The novel tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease, Ward embarks nonetheless on a search to rediscover his grandmother, no long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier.
This was lovely. It’s rich with beauty and ruin. There’s something missing from the heart of it, though, that was missing— for me— from the heart of Crossing to Safety too. Perhaps Stegner and I just aren’t soul mates, as much as I’d agree with him on the way the world works.
“My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandmother’s side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.”
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21 April, 2014:
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21 April, 2014:
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