I read Crossing to safety in my early 30's. Not only did I love Stegner's writing,but I could imagine a life much like the Lang's and the Morgan's. Now that I am about the same age as the narrator I find less to relate to. The characters live in a world that is privileged and without diversity. Stegner represents the times perfectly but the times are no longer as appealing to me. Still, the writing is beautiful, and I will happily re read another Stegner novel in the future. The first read was 5 stars this time its a solid 4

This is one of my FAVORITE BOOKS.....'ever'!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Angle of Repose" (also by Wallace Stegner), is also one of my favorite top 10 books --(this is the first time I can say ---I 'really'--'really' can claim to have read TWO books by an author that will be forever LIFE-TIME-FAVORITES!!!!!

I'm only sorry I waited this long to read "Crossing to Safety". (its timeless).

Beautifully written --

Vivid-engaging-(story-telling at its best).

Another 'GREAT' book club discussion book (why hasn't our book club picked this one to read??)

A quote to remember......"I'd rather spend it on Charity" (what is it about that line that has the reader continue to 'think' about this?) ----and 'why' do I find it soooooo pure and beautiful??? (hmmmmmmmmmmmm)......

love it --- loved it.....loved it..... (a book hard to forget --and a book to read again)

elyse

In many ways this masterfully told story deserves a 5, but it leaves me in a 4 state. Still, I’m rounding to 5 for exceptional writing, and because it has stayed with me and left me reflecting for days, and I think will continue to do so.

This novel feels like an author exploring deeply personal traumas from a relationship system consisting of a powerful controlling female and otherwise capable males who seem powerless in her orbit and clueless about how to live any differently than in life-sucking submission to her well-meaning grinding micro-management.

It’s interesting, deeply engaging, and far more nuanced than I make it sound. Still, I couldn’t stop saying, really guys? You can’t imagine any immediate or relationship response to this queen bee than to fall in line as tormented worker bees? You can’t even try?

I know, exploring this dynamic was (I believe) the point of the book, so complaining about it isn’t exactly fair. But Queen Bee was the most interesting and dynamic character. The hapless-in-her-presence male co-stars were mostly shown only as reactors to the queen.

The female co-star was hardly a character in her own right, just a female stereotype opposite to the queen. Another worker bee, but neither tormented nor submissive to the queen. Not, I think, because she is meant to be shown as personally powerful (I think she’s meant to be shown as appropriately powerless, though that’s not how I necessarily read her, sliver of a character though she is, from my world). More, I think, because the author is far less interested in the female characters or their relationships to each other than in the power they hold over or leave to the males. This, I think, is the book’s central theme—the power of a woman to shape a man’s life.

The power structures, and assumptions about what power is and what weakness is, make you think. And they reflect cultural limitations that are irritating to a more contemporary and feminist perspectives. This is clearly a book by a man, a thoughtful man, whose thinking and experiences are shaped by a time that isn’t ours, but it reflects issues and concerns that remain timeless.

Still, Stegner makes this world (early 30’s to late ‘70’s, I think, academically inclined America) live and breathe and you have to care what happens next and how they will all turn out, not just in their lives but more in the evolution of their relationships to each other.

A worthy read.

Life is a process of gradually narrowing choices. You learn this early in life, often when playing sports. You know you’re not going to be a Major League Baseball player because you can’t hit a curveball, or a fast fastball, or, in fact, the ball off a tee. Later, in school, you discover that your eyesight – and fear of heights – is going to keep you from being a jet pilot; and that your biology score is going to keep you from being a doctor, or passing biology; and that you aren’t ever going to be a lighthouse keeper because those things are all automated now.

The winnowing of opportunity extends to friendship. When you’re young and single and carefree you can hang out with whoever you want (whenever you want, at whatever bar you want).

Once you start to pair off, however, and your previously single-and-carefree friends do likewise, you wake up one morning to realize that all your friends are couple-friends. They are lovely people and you like them and all that – but they’re also a compromise to the circumstances of life. We’re friends because you’re married and we’re married and you have kids and we have kids!

I love my couple-friends. We have a great time together. The friendship, though, is not organic, at least not in the way of your first best friend, or your high school pals, or the guys you ran with in college. Couple friends are a trickier milieu. You need to make or discover a common ground, rather than having it to begin with.

After being friends with another couple for awhile, you forget who met who first. My wife and I still argue over who gets credit for creating our social circle. She thinks it’s her charm. I think it’s my low-grade alcoholism.

The dynamics of couple-friends is at the heart of Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. The two couples are Larry and Sally Morgan, and Sidney and Charity Lang. Larry is the novel’s first-person narrator. He is a teacher and a writer and a bit of a navel-gazer; she is a housewife. Sidney is also a teacher, and independently wealthy; his wife is a blunt and ambitious string-puller whose family owns a Kennedy Compound-like piece of land in the Vermont hills.

(There’s no perfect place to say this, so I’ll just say it here – there is no swinging in this book. Don’t expect anyone to be crossing to a foursome. I know, I was disappointed too).

The Morgans and the Langs meet in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin, during the Great Depression. In Crossing to Safety, however, the outside world seldom intrudes on a very insular, inward-looking story. Larry sometimes mentions his poverty (rapidly overcome), but the reality of the Great Depression – and, for that matter, the convulsions of World War II – are deeply backgrounded. Stegner’s interest is on the friendship between these four, and he allows very little to distract him from divining these mysteries.

It is clear to see the themes and arcs that Stegner is trying to develop. Larry and Sid (their wives are never given independent ambitions) begin as young, idealistic world-beaters, with aspirations towards publication. As they grow older, they confront the sudden turns and dead ends that inevitably litter the road of life.

This theme is stated rather explicitly:

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest. We never kidded ourselves that we had the political gifts to reorder society or insure social justice. Beyond a basic minimum, money was not a goal we respected…

Of course, the only people who can afford not to respect money are those who have it. And that’s part of the problem, dramatically speaking, with Crossing to Safety. Career-wise, at least, the road isn’t all that bad for Larry or Sid. Both of them trace a pretty nice career path that leaves them financially secure and able to spend entire summers at the Lang’s Vermont hideaway, enjoying nature, reading the classics, and eating extravagant lunches (the descriptions of the lunches should not be read on an empty stomach). They have the luxury of living what Charity calls the “austere life,” while floating above the everyday struggles other people. There are no bread lines, New Deal programs, or bean dinners for these folks.

In other words, Stegner is describing a very particular type of white middle class life. I don’t necessarily think he was going for universality with this story (which I believe to be partially autobiographical), but a certain universality has been heaped upon it, in naming this a classic. There are certain universal truths in play, but the Langs and the Morgans live very particular, not-very-relatable lives, especially given the context in which the novel plays out.

This is not to say that bad things don’t happen. They do. There are massive life disruptions that come out of nowhere, just like they do in life. Of course, these two couples are more able than most to weather these storms.

More than anything, this is a novel about aging. About the things that we start to lose, no matter how successful we are, how well we plan, how cleanly we live.

In order to cover four lives in 327 pages, there are some massive temporal leaps taken in the narrative. The novel begins in the novel’s present day, with all four friends in late middle age. It then flashes back to 1937, when the Langs and the Morgans meet and become instant besties. These scenes are rich and full of detail. Other sections, though, cover large swaths of life with cursory depictions. By the time the novel reaches its third act, the jumps have become so pronounced that it weakens the story. For instance, there comes a point when both families have young children. Then, in a matter of pages, those children are all grown and engaging in long paragraphs of expository dialogue.

Crossing to Safety is rather unusual in its topic and its execution. Larry’s interest in Sid and Charity borders on the Ahab-like. He describes them minutely, painstakingly, even relating a section of Sid and Charity’s courtship as though he were an omnipresent observer, though he had not yet met them. The odd result is that Sid and Charity become indelible characters, while Larry’s own wife Sally becomes a one-dimensional plot point.

That said, I liked this Crossing to Safety quite a bit. Stegner is a very good, at times beautiful writer.

It felt like a purification before the next fateful, hopeful chapter of our lives. Up to our chins in the water that foamed through its marble bowl, tiptoeing the smooth bottom to keep our noses above the surface, the light wavering and winking down on us and flickering off the curved walls, trees overhanging us and the sky beyond those, and all around and through us, a soul-massage, the rush and patter and tinkle of water and the brush and break of bubbles. It was a present that made the future tingle.

What I didn't know as I stood blissful in the foam was that I had begun to foam too, though I hadn’t yet felt the salt.

Stegner has the courage to give us characters who aren’t wholly likeable. Charity, especially, is an infuriating bundle of contradictions. He has some remarkable perceptions. And he really knows how to describe a picnic! His endgame, set at Sid and Charity’s compound, is absolutely devastating – not entirely pleasant to read, but honest and brutal.

Crossing to Safety ultimately lingers with you awhile as a mournful and melancholy tribute to the passage of time.

4.5 rounded up. My first Stegner, but likely not my last.

Many people read this as a story about marriage and friendship. As did I. Those themes meander deeply through this read, like the darkest part of a river, beneath the current where things that sink lie still despite the flow and churn above. Stegner's two couples create a magnified view of what people bring to a marriage or friendship, how those relationships ebb and flow, and how people continue with them even though the waters may roil from unexpected debris. But there was so much more to this story for me.

We are drawn to people, sometimes inexplicably. As we get to know them, those initial impressions undergo revision. Events and perceptions sift through life's colander, some things falling through our memories, while others stick, clogging our views. These four people come together through the husbands' work. Charity, vivacious, endearing, loving....no, wait...controlling, self-focused, demanding. Sid, weak, meek, submissive....no, wait...unassuming, giving, sacrificial. Sally, kind, protective, encouraging, accepting...no, wait...doubting, self-effacing. Larry, bright, ambitious, hungry for acceptance...no, wait...opinionated, judgemental, stubborn. Stegner takes us on a walk through a relational forest, dropping observational crumbs along the way, allowing the reader to gather them into a feast of self-assessment and other-assessment as we compare and contrast our own experiences and tendencies in our interactions with others to these characters.

But despite the appearance of being a book about relationships, hiding beneath the current is so much more. The dialogue and inner musings were rich with additional themes:

The influence of early mirrors provided by parents as to who we are and how they continue to influence our self-view and choices; how sudden tragedy or disappointment can shift our lives and test us; how there can be a chasm between how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others; how we assign judgement to what we see even when we see only the tip of human icebergs; why people engage in creative writing and are there "rules" about doing that well; the value we place (or not) on creative activities; what defines a successful life; the danger in comparing ourselves to others;what standard gets to decide if something or someone is good enough?

"Yet my good luck makes me uneasy around him. Every piece of fortune that enhances me seems to diminish him, though he never fails to warm me with his admiration. He makes me feel bigger and better than I am, and somehow, in the process, manages to lessen himself."

"He suggested that publishing was not a charitable enterprise. He named six titles on his fall list that he would be unable to publish if he weren't able to count on the sales of this one that Sid thought shouldn't have been published at all."

"You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam, you can still believe you are doing fine."

No, this novel is much more than a story about friendship and marriage. I felt the presence of Wallace Stegner on every page. Some say that's a bad thing in a novel. Truth be told, I didn't mind a bit....I'd have relished the opportunity for a walk in the forest with him, assembling those crumbs, counting on him to point out the ones I was missing.

Tuning Fork for Epiphanies in the Commonplace

That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual.—Emerson

I did not expect too much from this novel, not being a big fan of Stegner's most-recognized novels, Angle of Repose (thee and thou and thy and thine began to crawl my spine) and the uninspiring The Spectator Bird. I was caught off guard then, by how deeply I was stirred by Stegner's semi-autobiographical novel of a close, long-term friendship between two married couples, set in Wisconsin and New England.

Stegner composed a brilliant life contrast: the optimism and enthusiasm of two young, married couples starting out in Madison, Wisconsin, when hope sprung eternal, versus these same marrieds, thirty years on, after life, though gracing them in different ways, has ineluctably dealt each major disappointments and forced them into cathartic concessions.

What struck me most though, was how much Crossing to Safety--Stegner's final novel--more than any other novel I've read, seemed a perfect parting gift to the world: as his last piece of art, an elegiac exercise in the epiphanies emanating from the unexceptional, a sort of tuning fork to resound in us revelations found in ordinary lives and that we can yet discover in each of our own.

This novel not only profoundly moved me, it chimes on in my mind as a carillon of self-contemplation on marriage, friendship and family. One could hardly expect more of a novel.

I love a book that gently urges you to imagine the life within and let your heart feel it. This is a song of life, meant to be shared as it will help other’s hearts to dance too. This is writing that echoes through the ages. Words that point one in the direction of thinking about who we truly are as we find our way in this beautiful world. We bloom, we wilt, we fade and recede. Then comes the season we bud and bloom again. This is the way of things and Stegner reminds us that we’re all a part of that way. Regardless of wealth or status lightning can strike the poor man or the king. The world turns with or without us. A wonderful story.

This book is why I read. Period. I had 30 pages left in the book and I had more than ample time to finish it, but I just couldn’t. I was not ready to say goodbye to this book and the people in this book.

A character driven novel that revolves around 2 couple, Charity and Sid and Larry and Sally. The focus of the book is their friendship over the years. What drew them together initially is hard to say, but I think Charity saw Sally and Larry as a couple who needed her help and she loved helping people.

Larry is our narrator. As well, he is an author, so the keeper of their story. We do watch as both marriages evolve and change over the years, but it is the pull of this friendship that is the heart of the book. It makes the reader examine their own friends and makes one either grateful or bereft.

I felt an inner shaking at moments while reading this book. The power of Stegner’s words, how well he captured moments between these two couples, especially at moments of stress and volatility, left me undone.

“ There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.”

“ We have been invited into their lives, from which we will never be evicted, or evict ourselves.”

How can a person not stop and reread these words over and over. Such beautiful writing, it left me breathless.

This book explores marriages and friendship, not as perfection, but with all the upheavals and sacrifices and demands associated with them.
I absolutely adored this book and I highly recommend it. It’s powerful in a very subtle way.

Lovely, lovely writing in this quiet and contemplative study of friendship and the twists and turns that life takes. A sheer joy to read, I absolutely loved it.

SWOON!! My first Wallace Stegner. I'm in love! Can I have a literary crush on someone who's been dead for fifteen years? Is that comme il faut?

It's hard to find anything to say about this book that wouldn't just muddy up the waters. Just giving a plot summary would make it sound like a plain old ordinary book. Stegner's writing is just......WOW!! The book is about friendship and generosity and youthful extravagant hopes and finding ways to be happy when fate betrays us and our dreams don't come true. Read it! That's all I can say.

I really need to gather my thoughts but I will say this was a beautiful story of friendship/ marriage,sickness, health & life. From the very first sentence to the very last sentence the words flowed and told a story of human emotions. Life's ups and downs.

This book is a gift to everyone who is a friend or has a friend - basically everyone. It is the beautifully-written story of two couples who remain close despite changes in physical location and life-altering situations. Wallace Stegner writes of each couple's unfailing courtesy toward and compassion for the other in truly memorabe prose. The reader is able clearly to see each person individually, as part of a couple and as a member of their quartet. I truly hated to see this book end and I already look forward to reading it again and again.