4.50 Stars (Rnd ⬆️) — An All-time great of the American Novel, Stegner yet still— somehow — manages to go very much under-appreciated. This is — without hesitation — one of the higher crimes of our current Society of Literature Criticism!

Crossing to Safety — more so than other Stegner Classics — Feels eerily prescient & relevant in today’s wider-psyche. It’s characters feel modern & are punctuated with a gnawing self-loathing that sits just below the collective conscious mind. Wallace Stegner knows how to tell a family-drama, better than almost anyone. This story of a middle aged married couple & the mundane-idiosyncratic thoughts that dominate their minds flows elegantly page to page, only growing ever more sharp & yet also strangely soft, each chapter.

The characters are layered and unapologetic & the narrative sensible and simple, but all the more striking for it. Eisenhower-era principles permeate moments but aren’t too dominant, prohibition and depression used merely as checkpoints and time referees. I find this novel hard to put to words without it sounding a-bore.. but I assure you it truly, absolutely, is ANYTHING but.

5 ✒️✒️✒️✒️✒️
I first read this in 1987 or thereabouts and just as when I reread Angle of Repose last year, there was some unease about it not holding up to my original reception.

In the Afterwords in my edition, it is noted of writer T. H. Watkins, though "recognition and awards came his way over the years, he often said that one of his most meaningful achievements was his long and close friendship with Wallace Stegner.” I can only imagine.

This is a story about an epic friendship between two couples told without

"The high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish. . .the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends. . .the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power. . .speed, noise, ugliness, everything that. . .makes us recognize ourselves in fiction."

How does a writer make that compelling reading? As only he could do, Stegner pulled it off with “the alchemy of [his] pen" and once again leaves me at a loss for words. Five stars then and now.

You come to me and say, “I’m going away to a cabin in the woods by myself for a few days, to escape the noise of 21st century life. I need to recenter my priorities and remember what it can be like to disconnect with electronics and reconnect with humanity. I want to take something to read, similar to the incomparable Stoner by John Williams, that will remind me why I fell in love with literature. A quiet book where I can derive pleasure from the beauty of the words on the page and the images they conjure. It’s alright if it breaks my heart a little.”

I get up, take Crossing to Safety off the bookshelf, and press it into your hands. “This is the book,” I say.

“Really?” you ask. “A book written in the ‘80s about a decades-long friendship between two married couples? Hmm. I think I’ve heard of it.”

“Yes,” I respond. “You probably have. It’s a favorite of many astute readers. Had it not been for the inclusion of some plot points I try to avoid, it might have been one of mine.”

“Huh, okay. Then this is the book,” you confirm as you slide it into your bag.

“Yes it is,” I smile before adding while you walk out the door, “Just don’t forget you said you were alright with a broken heart.”

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Re-reading this novel after 25 years felt fresh and I appreciated it more. I have now experienced decades of marriage and my children are adults, so parts of the novel resonated with me differently. As always, Stegner's elegant prose makes my heart leap. I was amazed at how similar the academic world in the 1930s is to today.

The novel shines most with its portrayal of Charity, her need for generosity and control with her friends and within her marriage. The one-dimensional portrait of saintly Sally disappointed me and kept me from a 5 star rating.

Crossing to Safety is Wallace Stegner’s final novel, the culmination of a long and distinguished career, even if a number of critics have casually (and unjustly) dismissed him as a regional writer important only to readers of the American West. Crossing to Safety does not have the large historical sweep of two of his masterworks, The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose, focusing instead narrowly on the relationship of two couples over their adult lives. History is important, as it always is for Stegner (he was influenced heavily by Faulkner), but the searchlight here is directed almost entirely on the personal, with large earth-shaking events, such as World War II, serving only as a backdrop to contextualize the comings and goings of the two couples.

The novel is narrated by Larry Morgan, himself a writer, as he looks back over his marriage with Sally and their decades-long relationship with another couple, Sid and Charity Lang. The pending death of Charity is the catalyst for his narrative. The arc of the Larry’s narrative is one from youthful hopefulness sweeping into the maturity and insight that come with age and experience—a universal theme, in other words. Stegner’s brilliance as a writer and his deep wisdom make this a radiant novel filled with piercing insight. Stegner may have been deeply influenced by Faulkner, but this novel more directly evokes Henry James—and, indeed, Larry turns to James at least once to help him construct his narrative.

The two couples are a study in contrast, despite their deep friendship. Early in the novel, Larry talks about the four individuals’ youthful confidence and their desire to forge what he calls “the worthy life”: “With me it was always to be done with words; Sid too, though with less confidence [Sid is an academic and aspiring writer]. With Sally it was sympathy, human understanding, a tenderness toward human cussedness or frailty. And with Charity it was organization, order, action, assistance to the uncertain, and direction to the wavering.”

There are many lovely scenes early in the novel as the two couples get to know each other and forge bonds that seem permanent if not sacred. Really beautiful, joyous moments, moments that took me searching back into my own life. Not surprisingly, over the years life gets more complicated and dark for the two couples individually and together, as their dominant traits (as identified by Larry above) become even more dominant, more important to the shaping (and misshaping) of their lives and relationships. At one point, Larry notes that dark forces have surfaced in Sid and Charity’s marriage, what he deems the serpent in the Eden of their marriage and, potentially, the two couples’ relationship. After letting the reader know that his narrative will not be one of monstrous blowups or large-scale catastrophes, Larry adds that “there is this snake, no bigger than a twig or a flame of movement in the grass. It is not an intruder in Eden, it was born here. It is one of Hawthorne’s bosom serpents, rarely noticed because the bosom it inhabits it can so easily camouflage itself among a crowd of the warmest and most generous sentiments.”

Larry’s words point both forward to coming events and backward to what’s come before, alerting the reader to the necessity to reassess what had previously seemed like all goodness and light. A masterful stroke. As is this further observation by Larry: “It was not a big serpent, nor very alarming. But once we noticed it, we realized that it had been there all along. . . . Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means and I agree. But we are sometimes tempted to lie elsewhere, too. I could probably be tempted to lie just here. This is a crucial place for the dropping of hints and the planting of clues, the crucial moment for hiding behind the piano or in the bookcase the revelations that later, to the reader’s gratified satisfaction, I will triumphantly discover. If I am after drama.” Larry, the master Jamesian narrator, is in fact after drama, and the novel moves quickly toward and into it in its final pages.

What a rich and provocative novel, a novel that offers up so much joy and wisdom while at the same time progressively uncovering the selfish and cruel forces that often lie beneath the surface calm of everyday lives.

A very character driven book with gorgeous writing.

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

Stegner did it.

We follow two married couples from their bright eyed 1930s youth to their retirement years. There's no razzle dazzle, no shocks or mysteries, no scandals or horrors . Their hurts are subtle and familiar.

The writing is solid and reflective and downright beautiful.

I found the story to be mostly about acceptance. Loving people even when you don't like them. Finding satisfaction in life even when your plans fall through. Not settling, not feeling trapped or resentful, but just learning to be OK with your life and appreciating what you have instead of wasting your life obsessing over what you don't have. A curiously ordinary yet elusive concept.

Crossing to Safety was the beautiful and quiet novel by Wallace Stegner, that has become an enduring classic about the evolving and lifelong friendship between two couples, the Langs and the Morgans, meeting in Wisconsin when Sid Lang and Larry Morgan were beginning their first university teaching jobs in Madison during the Great Depression. Charity Lang and Sally Morgan form an instant bond of friendship and comradery in this character-driven novel. It is within the context of this enduring friendship that all of the complexities of human nature are explored. This tale unfolds in the words of Larry Morgan, the narrator, having grown up in New Mexico, is also a published novelist, while the Langs have deep Eastern and academic roots. This was a magnificent work that I will definitely read again. While this is the first novel that I have read by Wallace Stegner, it certainly will not be the last.

"Considerate la vostr semenza: fatti non foste viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza. 'Consider your birthright,' we told each other when fatigue or laziness threatened to slow our hungry slurping of culture. 'Think who you are. You were not made to live like brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.' Very high toned. We all hitched our wagons to the highest stars we could find."

n  "I could give all to Time--except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with what I have kept."n

-- ROBERT FROST

Wallace Stegner is one of my favorite writers; I am a fan of both his fiction and nonfiction.

I have read "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" three times and it, along with his Pulitzer Prize winning "Angle of Repose," rank among my ten all-time favorite novels. But, sadly, I never did connect with his main characters in this one, at least not two of them.

I especially had difficulty with the character named Charity. How ironic. She is a control freak who to the very end manipulates and controls the lives of those who are close to her. She is incapable of unconditional love and it is through attaching strings to her love and affection that she is able to get her way with others, a trait she inherited from her mother. And her husband? Should I feel sorry for him? Nope, can't do it.  He should have lit out for the territory -- sooner the better -- maybe to Square Butte, Montana where he could have supported himself as a bartender in the only commercial establishment in the area (SB really exists, but I hesitate to call it a town). There he would have been free to commune with nature and write poems that he liked even if nobody else did.

What does salvage the book for me to some extent is the exemplary relationship shared by the other principal couple in the story. There were no conditions attached to their love; they accepted each other for what they were. I also liked how the story ended.

Some of my GR friends have given the book high ratings, but I have hesitated to read them before now, but now I will. Who knows? They may manipulate change my mind.

And I'm certainly not through with Mr. Stegner. I recently purchased a copy of "The Spectator Bird," which won a National Book Award, and for some reason have never gotten around to reading. I look forward to doing just that in the near future.

“How do you make a book that everyone will read from lives as quiet as these?” is the pre-occupation of narrator Larry Morgan, a proxy for Stegner, who along with his polio-stricken wife Sally and another couple, Sid and Charity, form the foursome about whose lives, stretching from the 1930’s to the 1970’s, this novel is all about. It’s a novel about friendship, and their friendship and love for each other transcend the physical limits of their bodies.

Larry and Sally are orphans from the west, while Charity and Sid are from prosperous east-coast families, brought together in academia where the two men are employed as university professors. Sid is henpecked and dominated by Charity who wants him to abandon his poetic drive and write text books instead in order to achieve tenure, while Sally is supportive of Larry’s attempts to become a literary writer no matter what the job prospects. Both marriages are built on addiction and dependence by husbands upon wives and vice versa. The resentment and tension that builds up over the years between Sid and Charity provides the fuel for this otherwise slow-paced novel which is praised as Stegner’s best. It was also his last.

Stegner takes the time to paint academics as an insecure, cliquish, class conscious bunch of intellectual snobs to whom credentials matter more than creativity, and who pursue the security of tenure relentlessly. Their speech is littered with literary allusions and they read poetry at parties. This was at a time when “literature mobilized the masses and poetry brought thousands to the barricades.”

Strong women and weak men characterize this novel. Charity and her mother, Aunt Emily, dominate their husbands, Sally, with her illness, commands Larry’s attention. When Charity is stricken with cancer, it raises the specter of when Sally’s sudden “cave in” would occur due to her polio, and the deeper question in both Larry and Sid’s minds: can they survive without their wives?

Charity is a master planner, not only mapping out Sid’s career and life (during her life and after her death), but parcelling out her vast family estate so that their five dispersed adult children will return to the nest after her death. From the recounting of one of her children, we wonder whether the children fled the coop in the first instance just to escape their domineering mother. However, Charity is a wonderful caregiver and feels for all those around her, in particularly, Sally, her best friend. “Overachievers have more fun without drugs and orgies than hedonists,” and Charity is the supreme overachiever. Yet her well-ordained life is not without its deep disappointments, like when Sid loses his job during the war, or when Sally contracts polio due to a forced hike that Charity drove the foursome to undertake just after Sally had delivered her one and only baby. And the men achieve their goals despite their women’s efforts to help or hinder them: Larry becomes a recognized writer and Sid finally gets his tenure just as he is reaching retirement, more out of seniority than for any text books he wrote.

Stegner takes the time to provide wonderful descriptions of the land, including a sojourn in Florence where the foursome meet while Larry is writing one of his books. The genuine camaraderie these four enjoy in each other’s company is palpable throughout the book, although we have to endure lots of commonplace events; picnics, hikes, dinner parties and visits to each other, to see that emerge. There is a fair amount of overwriting and many non-events, judged by today’s speeded-up tastes. As the book nears its climax, there is a lengthy meditation on death and how it impacts survivors of the dying.

Stegner’s life seems to mirror this book: men dominated by strong women, stuffy academics, writers who make it to respectability relatively quickly with a bit of luck and good timing, sojourns in various parts of America and abroad. Yes, it is a story about quiet lives, none that left a mark on the world, but on whom the world left its marks. And that would mean, most of us.

never related to any of the characters. Characters seemed so ivory tower (summers at the lake, nannies for the children), but the part I disliked most was that none of the characters ever seemed to mature much or gain much insight to themselves. It strechted most of a life time, but no one seemed to grow up. Writing was great, but I am not an english major. there were a few pieces in there that were good, but they were about issues facing writers and academics, none of which spoke to me. the pieces of their life that might have been similar and a place to connect, like raising kids, were sped over or even just dispensed with by constantly having nannies to care for the kids for weeks or months at a time. I mean, I get the premise that books don't have to manufacuture tragedy like an Oprah Book to be worthwhile, but you can't write a book about the arc of a lifetime and avoid dealing with most major life issues (but arfully describing the surroundings!). The death at the end was the only life issue I felt he delved into in any meaningful way.

For me this book is difficult to review. On the one hand I needed two weeks for 280 pages which is not a good sign, on the other hand I enjoyed reading it a lot. In the end I did not know how to rate it. Instead of deciding spontaneously I listened two the both voices in my head (yes, I hear voices), the Good Guy and the Bad Guy. I will give you just a short summary of their dialogue.
GG: "You must be kidding. Three stars for this excellently written masterpiece?"
BG: "I don't object that part, it's well written, but what was it about?"
GG: "Friendship, well educated people, marriage, age and the meaning of life. What else do you expect?"
BG: "Uhh, educated people who quote incessantly Eliot, Dante and Goethe and thousands of writers I could not even repeat the names of. And then those characters: Four saints in a rectangular friendship who excuse themselves all the time for being generous. The worst sin described is Charity's tendancy to be a bit pushy and Sid's tendancy to be a bit weak. I stress a bit since everything in this novel is a bit of something, but never the real thing."
GG: "Stegner himself admits he did not want to write a drama or an adventurous story. And what is wrong with that. You liked Independence day a lot and nothing happens there either."
BG: "At least Bascombe is mischievous and - you know - I like bad guys. But this is not the point. It makes a lot of difference if nothing happens in four days or if nothing happens in half a century. And finally: it does not improve the lack of plot if the author tells us that he did in on purpose. Name at least three events in his story."
GG: "The accident on the lake..."
BG: "They were saved in a couple of minutes."
GG: "Sally's dramatic sickness..."
BG: "Well, in the end she is the most sane in the scene."
GG: "I think I should not mention the teabags...."
BG: "Better not."

In the end, as in most cases, BG won the dispute. [Book: Crossing to safety] is like a beautiful day on a sailboat in the midst of the most wonderful landscape, but without wind.