The subject matter is complex, with minor themes like East coast vs. West coast, traditional values vs. 70s cultural rebellion, marriage vs. individual desire, success vs. failure, loyalty vs. betrayal, etc. But Jackson J. Benson has pointed out in his 2000 Introduction, that there is a main theme running through, namely, how we as a people, or more accurately cultural transplants, define ourselves in this new land, and what we have actually inherited.
The book starts at Grass Valley, California with Lyman Ward, the grandson and a retired historian. Right after being diagnosed with a rare bone disease and having had a leg amputated, he is abandoned by his wife. Defying the fate of being helpless and useless, Lyman decides to organize hundreds of letters written by his grandmother to her good friend Augusta from 1876 to 1891, with a plan to write a biography. Hiring a schoolgirl from Berkeley as his secretary, he manages to reconstruct his grandmother's life, and allows us to look into the inner world of a 19th century American woman artist and writer, Susan Burling Ward (based on the real person of Mary Hallock Foote). Uprooted from Milton, and Brooklyn, New York to marry a mining engineer, she move around, from New Almaden, Santa Cruz (California), Leadville (Colorado), Michoacán (Mexico), Boise Canyon, the Mesa (Idaho) and finally back to the Zodiac Cottage in Grass Valley.
The web of complex relationships is a factor that, at times, hindered my reading. During the investigation of his grandmother's life through illustrated letters, Lyman also discovers the complicated relationship between his grandparents, his father with his parents, his own with his son and ex-wife, and his ambiguous feeling towards his secretary. Grandma breaks something she cannot mend by falling in love with her husband's assistant at the expense of losing three family members, namely, the drowning of her youngest daughter and lifelong estrangement of both son and husband. Such a tragedy is reenacted in Lyman's lifetime. His own wife Ellen elopes with his surgeon who has amputated his leg.
What makes the reading endurable is the very courage many characters have demonstrated to choose to live on and complete their life journey despite their flaws and mistakes. Instead of feeling sorry for themselves, Lyman and his grandmother accept their misfortune with courage, and live a parallel life with the rest of the world by finding and maintaining a perfect angle of repose, even though it might take half a century to do so.
