I’m not going to lie (I’m really bad at it) but I’ll have to admit I only heard about Wallace Stegner last year. At the time I’d read a very positive and passionate review and that was enough for me to know I had to read it. And the title, oh my goodness, isn’t it simply wonderful?

When I started the book a few days ago I basically knew nothing about it besides the fact that this was going to be a story about two couples who become friends. Today, I’m ready to rave about it to the whole world.

Wallace’s elegant, gentle and refined storytelling skills gave me shivers down my spine from the very first page (I promise you’re not going to find a single swear word in these pages).
This was (is!) a beautiful story and the characters jumped out from the pages. I feel like I know them better now than some people I’ve known all my life. Oh, my gosh, how I cared about these people. My hands were literally shaking all the time I held this book in my hands.

And if get started about Wallace’s prose, I’m afraid you all might think I’m just crazy and obviously exaggerating. Well, I’m not. Exaggerating, I mean, but I’m a bit crazy, yes. I underlined the whole book!

While telling this story Wallace gives a sense of space and time like no other author I’ve read before.
In my opinion, that was his main strength as a writer.

“Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.”

As I mentioned above, this is basically a story about two couples and the way they interact with one another; and it’s told from the perspective of one of them at an older age. So yes, plenty of nostalgic and melancholic feelings in here. I believed their friendship from start to finish. I loved them all. All I wished for them was exactly what I wish for myself; that we all could get to a place and time in this crazy life where we’d finally feel like we were Crossing to Safety.

We will get there.

A Lost World

Once upon a time there was an American Republican President named Eisenhower. Ike wasn’t a very smart man but he was not an evil man. He didn’t like the way the world was run, not even in his own country. But he remained calm in his politics and civil to his political opponents. He set an example. People felt safe around other people.

At that time there was a place called Vermont. It contained a smaller place called the Northeast Kingdom. There were no motorways then and this place wasn’t on the way to anywhere else. So if you were there, you meant to be there. It had quiet roads for children to walk along, forested hills that the same children could get lost among, and general stores that these children could count on for shady coolness when they found their way home. These smelled of smoke and sweet tobacco.

It is of course the smells that are most memorable but the least describable. Outside the general store, the repair crew works reeking tar into the cracks of the roadbed. The scent of the maples is only noticeable as you enter the stand of spruce, and theirs, only while coming back into the maples. The lake water smells of the rotting leaves on the bottom. I’m sure it’s possible to smell the ozone on the mountains if the wind isn’t blowing. Smell is the quickest sense to accept its environment as normal but also the one that makes the most dramatic effect when re-encountered.

It was a good time even if not the best of times. There was this disease called polio. Anyone could catch it, almost anywhere. Many did; everyone knew someone who knew someone who had it. Polio didn’t kill everyone it found, but it did a heck of a job killing their nervous system. Remember President Roosevelt? A bit smarter than Eisenhower but he could only stand up straight with steel braces on his legs. He caught polio in Canada, just over the border. Summertime wasn’t all fun and games. Sometimes it was dangerous. But it was never unexpected.

Of course the good old days for us were the new unpredictable days of the mid-twentieth century for most of the country folk roundabout. We, especially we children, were a problem. We made senseless noise; we had no predictable routines; we did nothing productive; we had no skills useful in the countryside; and we spoke out of turn. We lacked any hint of Methodist discipline or deference. We were therefore dealt with most harshly by the natives - with a stern scowl. Nevertheless “There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.”

Re-visiting that time and place is dangerous, not because it’s an idealised past which doesn’t measure up to scrutiny, but because it’s a forgotten past which suddenly re-emerges with the emotional force of death. This time is not 60 or 70 years ago; it is yesterday. And the chasm between yesterday and today is an entire life which has been expended. For good or ill, this life has dissipated and dispersed down that hole. The chasm demands to be filled with meaning. The content doesn’t matter that much. Tragedy, fulfilment, success, sacrifice, regret are really equivalent rubble. But only when the gap is filled can a crossing be made safely.

It is always surprising what the best fiction-writing raises from the psychic depths. Connections to others, and to oneself, abound in the most unlikely places during the most unlikely times.

Crossing to Safety is a quiet book, but a pleasure through and through to read. I think it is meant for mature readers.

In short, it is a book about lifelong friendship between two couples. Within its pages you live out the friendship from start through times, disability and a loss. Others have summarized it better than I might, so I will leave it at that.

Here are some quotes I liked:

"Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ..."

"It is accepted that whatever the children learn, they learn from Aunt Emily. And any child who undergoes Aunt Emily's instruction is a post under a pile driver."

"When you're nailing a custard pie to the wall. and it starts to wilt, it doesn't do any good to hammer in more nails."

It is interesting to me when a writer talks about writing. Here is what Stegner muses: "Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? Who appoints them as mouthpieces? If they appoint themselves, as they clearly do, how valid is the commission?" And then, 'The gift is its own justification, and there is no way of telling for sure, short of the appeal to posterity, whether it's really worth something or whether it's only the ephemeral expression of a fad or tendency, the articulation of a stereotype."

My answer is that whatever kind of writer Stegner sees in himself, this book is really worth reading.

A beautiful story about friendship, but so much more. It's about our commitment to ourselves versus our loyalty to those we love, those we choose to do life with. And it's about the compromises we make, and whether they are in fact compromises if we are doing it for someone we love as much, if not more, than ourselves. The writing is superb, and I thought Stegner did a great job at casually incorporating philosophical discussions into the characters' conversations without it becoming pedantic. My only criticism is the female characters are a bit flat, though we are told that they are more than that. I wish we could've seen that instead. It would've been quite a different book, though, if it had been from all 4 main characters' POVs, so I guess that's just one drawback of a limited 1st-person narration. Overall, would recommend especially to people who enjoy character-driven literary fiction novels.

Thanks to my friend Anne who has mentioned this book a few times on her podcast, n  What Should I Read Next?n

This was definitely one of the better books I have read this year. A slower paced book that I still felt deserved every one of the 5 stars I gave it. This story involved a very intimate and intense look at 4 friends and two marriages over the span of their adult lives. The writing was so descriptive and real...I will go as far as to say it was beautiful. The book is filled with many wonderful quotes. I became so involved in the course of the lives of Larry, Sally, Sid and Charity, that I felt as if I was saying goodbye to old friends when it was over. Charity is such a great literary character. Many people probably didn't like her, but I found her mesmerizing. She was such a bitch at times, and yet, unflinchingly generous and so full of life. She wanted the best out of life and when she could, she took it.....but she shared it with those she loved. She really lived and expected everyone around her to do the same. I didn't completely identify with these people or their priorities, and still found this book captivating....to me that says something about the powerful writing. This is the first book I have read by Wallace Stegner, but it won't be the last. If you are looking for something to sink your teeth into, I highly recommend!

"Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary."
This book about friendship and marriage is one of the wisest, quietest, most profound books ever. I first read it when it was published in 1987, when I was 34 years old, not long married and with an infant daughter. It was wonderful to read then, but how much more it resonates with me now, with a marriage that is still good, an adult daughter to be proud of, and, yes, friends that have been with us for all those years. Friends who have laughed and cried and shared successes and failures with us, who have needed and been needed in turn. It is just as impossible to imagine life without them as to think about the loss of my husband. Crossing to Safety uses two marriages, and four people to make you think about the concept of safety. Is the first one to die the safe one, leaving the others to cope with a missing limb; or the survivors, for now?
This quiet novel is about love and friendship, lives well-lived while coping with what fate hands us, and endurance. This is not true of all second readings of a beloved book, but life and experience and time made the second time around a more enriching read.

This was a compelling story of two couples who begin a lifelong friendship when they are both newly married. It is interesting to watch the growth and change in the friendships and the marriages over the next 40 years.

Stegner's writing style is wonderful, unhurried, and very descriptive. He made me like the people, the places where they lived, where they summered in a cabin by the lake, and the interactions between all four main characters. I felt like I was there with them! I will definitely be reading more of Stegner's books!

Character-driven novel about a long friendship between two couples, Sally and Larry Morgan and Charity and Sid Lang, who met at the University of Wisconsin during the Great Depression. Both Larry and Sid are writers and teachers. Sally and Larry are struggling newlyweds. Charity and Sid have inherited wealth and are striving for tenure. As the story opens, Larry and his wife are visiting Sid and Charity at their sprawling property in Vermont in 1972. Larry narrates the story of the friendship in an intimate manner, telling of their triumphs and setbacks.

In the beginning, the focus is on the developing friendship, and the tone one of is happiness and excitement about the future. The joie de vivre of youth is almost palpable. In this section, it is easy for the reader to become fond of these four people. Of course, the happy times cannot continue forever. Life happens, each couple experiences challenges and disappointments, and expectations are adjusted.

Stegner is a master at gradually revealing the relationship dynamics occurring behind the scenes. One of the four tends to try to control situations and people out of concern for their happiness. My favorite part is the idyllic summer the couples spend at Sid and Charity’s family retreat in Vermont. The author uses his power of description to vividly bring the region to life:

“I wonder if I have ever felt more alive, more competent in my mind and more at ease with myself and my world, than I feel for a few minutes on the shoulder of that known hill while I watch the sun climb powerfully and confidently and see below me the unchanged village, the lake like a pool of mercury, the varying greens of hayfields and meadows and sugarbush and black spruce woods, all of it lifting and warming as the stretched shadows shorten. There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.”

This book is filled with similar elegant writing. It is a story of life, love, friendship, and aging. It is sedate, reflective, nuanced, and a pleasure to read.

5★ again
“Charity is tall and striking; Sally smaller, darker, quieter. One dazzles, the other warms.”

They are half of the foursome completed by Sid and Larry, their husbands. The four of them meet in their twenties, become fast friends, though from very different backgrounds, and bump up against each other on and off for the rest of their lives. Their bond is tested from time to time, by distance and circumstance, but remains unbroken.

Larry Morgan narrates the story, beginning near the end, when he and Sally are grandparents staying in a family cottage at the lake. But soon he reminisces about his and Sally’s first ‘home’ together in a tiny basement apartment. It’s during the Depression, and they had just moved from New Mexico to Madison, Wisconsin, where he has a one-year teaching job at the university while he writes.

“I set up a card table for a desk and made a bookcase out of some boards and bricks. In my experience, the world's happiest man is a young professor building bookcases, and the world's most contented couple is composed of that young professor and his wife, in love, employed, at the bottom of a depression from which it is impossible to fall further, and entering on their first year as full adults, not preparing any longer but finally into their lives.”

Grown-ups at last! I loved this book when a friend sent it to me years ago, saying “You must read this!” She and I grew up with fathers who were university professors. They didn’t teach in the same field and came from backgrounds as different as those of the Morgans and the Langs, but she and I were kindred spirits and became best friends at 12. I feel I know these people, and I know them better now that I'm a grandparent. But I digress.

When Larry and Sally arrive in Madison, she is pregnant and they know nobody. They attend a department afternoon tea, and late one day, Larry comes home, bounding down the stairs to cheer up lonely Sally, and is surprised to find company.

“They sat smiling at me. Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view of earth, but it has a certain distance about it, it is under control, you can see her head going on working behind it. This other one, a tall young woman in a blue dress, had quite another kind. In the dim apartment she blazed. Her hair was drawn back in a bun, as if to clear her face for expression, and everything in the face smiled—lips, teeth, cheeks, eyes. I mean to say she had a most vivid and, I saw at once, a really beautiful face.”

One wonders. Larry is devoted to Sally, but he makes Charity sound awfully appealing. Charity is also pregnant (with her second child) and has welcomed Sally as a sister. She invites them to their next party, and Larry is stunned by the magnificent picture the Langs make as they answer the door.

On campus, Sid has always seemed a mild-mannered, gray-suited, bespectacled, deferential man. Not at home, he isn’t. Here he seems like someone who might charm Sally.

“Sidney Lang, he overwhelmed the sight. . . dress was the least part of his transformation. Something had enlarged and altered him. If this had happened in recent years, I would be compelled toward images of Clark What's-His-Name throwing off his glasses and business suit and emerging in his cape as Superman.

This English instructor in his Balkan or whatever it was shirt, standing by his beautiful wife and crushing the hands of his guests, was by Michelangelo out of Carrara, a giant evoked from the rock.”

Larry may be over-awed, but the Langs are impressed that he’s actually had his stories published. (Universities demand Publish or Perish.) In answer to some of the academic show-offs at the party, Larry persuades quiet Sally to read some of "The Odyssey" aloud in Greek.

“She has great dignity and presence when she is cornered, and when she reads that antique poetry she can bring tears to your eyes. It is much better than if you could understand it. She chants out of a remote time with the clang of bronze in it.”

After the party, the four take the first of their countless walks together.

“I remember how quiet it was, how empty the streets at that hour, how our feet were loud on pavement and then hushed in grass and then crackly in leaves. There was a glint of settling frost in the air. Our voices and breaths went up and got mixed with the shadows of trees and the bloom of arc lights and the glitter of stars.”

Walking, camping, swimming, getting out into the fresh air is much a part of the story as the academic striving for jobs and tenure. The activities seem to pull the four together into the kind of camaraderie-loyalty-rivalry you find between siblings or close cousins who have grown up together.

Family. These four are a unit, complete, content, happy to endure the trials of life together.

Something that struck me is that the Langs’ children and the Morgans’ daughter are generally ‘offstage’ being looked after by ‘the girl’ who works for the Langs. Mostly, we watch the foursome develop their connection and watch how they manage their conflicts and make allowances for each other.

Charity is a force of nature. She is the flame around which the others flit. She plots their route, plans their activities, brooks no arguments, although there certainly are some.

“She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.”

But they love her, and cooperate to keep the peace and maintain the friendship. She reminds me of my father’s occasional joke that “You’ll enjoy yourself whether you like it or not.”

Stegner’s writing is beautiful, comfortable, easy to read. His people are academics, so there is a lot of conversation around poetry, literature, history, culture – all of which they love, but if it’s unfamiliar to you, it doesn’t matter.

You don’t need to know "The Odyssey" to understand how Sally charmed her listeners. You don’t need to have walked through the Vermont woods to appreciate the effect on newcomers. You will feel right at home anyway.

The narrator of this novel, Larry Morgan, at one point says to his wife, n  “But if I’m going to set the literary world on fire, the only way to do it is to rub one word against the other.”n

Not only did Wallace Stegner likely set the literary world on fire with this book, he set me on fire! Can you imagine reading an entire book about the long friendship between two couples and being left gasping at the end, longing for more?

The characters in this book (primarily Larry and his wife Sally, and their friends Sid and Charity Lang) have personalities that are indelibly etched in my heart. I know these people – not just from the outside but because parts of each one are, or have been parts of me, too – at one point or another in my life. At the very least, I was definitely them and they were me during the course of reading this book.

The places I have never been that are described in this book are places as familiar to me now as they would be had I grown up there. The trees, the smells, the weather changes, the variants in the sky – I know them all intimately from reading this book.

Wallace Stegner does not need plot devices at all to draw his readers in close enough to live in the book. I don’t know how he does it, but he does – with wit, with compassion, with understanding and with care.

I definitely want to read more of Mr. Stegner’s writing this year. This book was a lovely gift to myself and I plan to repeat the action over the coming months. I also highly recommend that everyone gift themselves with at least a couple of Wallace Stegner’s novels this year if at all possible.

This is a beautifully written insight into marriage and friendship. There are two couples, Sally and Larry and Charity and Sid, the couple they meet and become friends with. The characters are all portrayed realistically, both the good and the bad. I liked the way at the beginning Sally and Larry see Charity and Sid as almost perfect. Over time their imperfections are revealed but that does nothing to deter the friendship that has sprung up between them.
Charity is manipulative and bossy. At times I wanted to smack her, yet she is also generous and caring. In some ways I could understand Charity. All the characters in this novel, except perhaps Sally, are a mixture of good and bad traits. While you and your friends may be different to these, this novel makes you look at your own relationships, and how much you are prepared to accept their foibles and love them in spite of them or sometimes even because of them. It is also a look at two marriages and how what appears to be the situation from an outsider’s point of view, even a friend who loves them, may be quite different to that of those inside it.
The novel gives plenty to think about. Although it is a quiet novel it is compelling in its own way and not without moments of drama or moments that will leave you angry or in tears, or it did me. I enjoyed this novel which even to the end is understated. I had moments where I put it aside to think about before reading on. It is not one to read quickly but one to make you think. The very last page or so is probably in keeping with the tenor of the novel but to me it felt a bit flat. Still, it’s worth reading.

"How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?"

Just like this. Gorgeous, wonderful, beautiful. Read this book, especially if you're a fan of Gilead or Jayber Crow. It has the same paced, steady feel. Warning: I bawled through the last quarter. But then it was over and I wanted to start back again at the beginning. Just read it!