A snobbish character who writes for eastern literary magazines carries on an affair with Frank Sargent that leads to her daughter Agnes's drowning death in Idaho, and her husband never touches her again after the incident.  
This novel ends with the protagonist have a nightmarish dream in which his wife and neighbor argue over who gets to bathe him.  One character in this work invented but did not patent hydraulic cement and flood control valves, but he lost the profits to opportunists.  A snobbish character who writes for eastern literary magazines carries on an affair with Frank Sargent that leads to her daughter Agnes's drowning death in Idaho, and her husband never touches her again after the incident.  The protagonist's only child is named Rodman, and he is a former history professor at Berkeley who reconstructs the lives of his grandparents through a series of letters he finds.  FTP, name this novel about Susan, Lyman, and the engineer Oliver Ward, a work of Wallace Stegner.
This novel ends with the protagonist have a nightmarish dream in which his wife and neighbor argue over who gets to bathe him.  
{Angle of Repose} (4) [AH]