Wallace Stegner and the Conflicted Soul of the West

“Stegner’s settings range from academia and the literary world to mining camps and boomtowns, but his most consistent subject is marriage, represented in a mode more epic than romantic. Monogamy, with its crags and chasms, is the most salient and imposing feature in his imaginative landscape, the human undertaking around which all the others are organized. Marriages in his books are not always harmonious — spouses quarrel, separate and sometimes stray — but they always endure.”

Stegner is one of my favorite writers and I really enjoyed this piece by A.O. Scott looking at his work as a whole. He is by no means perfect, but I'm always drawn into his books because of the focus on relationships and as the above quote says, marriage. I find marriage a fascinating thing, how it works so differently for everyone and how it changes over time. Stegner writes about all of that in ways that never fail to make me think or see it in some new way.