Well-written novel about the strong friendship between two couples. Beautiful meditations on the nature of work, privilege, marriage, joy and suffering, among other things. It didn't impact me nearly as much as his Angle of Repose did, which caused me to wonder how I'd have felt if I'd read this one first.

So I read this book in Boise just before moving to Madison to start grad school. I had purchased it at Pioneer books in Provo (I think that's what the place with the millions of books and the tall strange owner who wears sandals with socks) a few years ago and then had never read it. I was at my parents' house one day when I decided to go out to their garage and try to find a couple of interesting books to read. I just felt like I should read this book, and I did. I felt like I had been purposefully directed to the book at a specific time in my life when it was most useful to me. It tells the story of a young married man beginning grad school in Madison, Wisconsin and his life-long friendship with another couple that he and his wife met there. Our first day in Madison, our local faith congregation had tons of people arrive to help us move it, and we stayed up late talking with a couple named the Stocks. They were really really good to us the first few days as we were getting settled. A couple of nights later I mentioned to Dave that I had just read Crossing to Safety and they reminded me of that family. He confessed to having read the book a few months before when they were moving to Madison and having the same sensation. So this book, although worthy enough in its own right of five stars, has a special sentimental and deeply personal resonance for me.

Crossing to safety is a coming to life story of two couples who meet during the depression era.
This is a story of four people, two couples and countless dreams. Charity Lang meets Sally Morgan and they strike up an immediate friendship. Their husbands get drawn into their private little circle and almost immediately a life long friendship is struck.
Larry narrates the book starting from the moment he and Sally met Charity, now on their way to meet Charity who is dying of cancer. Its a friendship that has stood test of time, vulnerabilities, despair, misery and loyalty. Larry picks the moments in his life with Sid and Charity that came to shape his life. They are there when he faces his first elation. They are there when disappointments uproots his life. The four of them struggle through the vapidness of life and somehow manage to breathe.

It isn't an easy task to explain what is going on in this book. There are no dramatic moments that we come to see in novels with setting such as this. Its a quiet story about four people - ordinary people who go through the notions of life just like everyone else. The strength of the book doesn't lie in the characters but in Stegner's writing. The almost hypnotic narration invites us in to their world and allow us to observe.

This by far is one of my favorite novels of Wallace Stegner. I read this several years ago, but I am now bringing my review to Goodreads.

Where do I begin?

Do I talk about the friendship between the two couples of 35 years?

Or do I talk about the love, or the order versus chaos, or the nature versus art, or the academia?

I know, it sounds like this could be complete chaos. And yet it isn’t. It is so much more.

When we think about the friendship between these couples we consider it a reflection about life, memory and art. It gives the book a complexity without detracting from it being an engaging story about interesting people. Or are they complicated people?

Illness happens. Jobs are lost. Wars start. Dreams lost. (One wanted to write a book about one of the characters. Life imitating art?)

Stegner seems like a realist in his own reflection as a writer telling this story. I wonder sometimes if he knows these people personally. (The characters he created.)

Still, it seems like the unifying theme overall is the friendship. Even if there is underlying tension.

So, even if this book was published back in 1988, it is such a classic, and could be read and taught today in college classrooms. (It probably is, right?!) Afterall, how much do we really change as humans?

A bit conflicting feelings about this one. For the first 200 pages, I was annoyed by the nostalgic tone of the narrator Larry Morgan, a bit too complacently looking back on his paradisiacal days at a small university in Wisconsin; I was repelled by the stifling friendship between him, his wife Sally and the wealthy, snobbish couple Charity and Sid Lang who took them in tow; and I was angered by the WASP environment in which this novel entirely takes place. At the same time, I kept reading, somehow intrigued by the way in which the author broke through the cliché story, interspersed it with an older man's perspectives on his past, on ageing, on the meaning of his own life, and above all on the relationship with his wife and that friendly couple.

Stegner wrote this book when he was 78, and I assume narrator Larry is pretty much autobiographical. But Larry certainly not is the main character of this story; no, that’s the insufferable control freak Charity who managed to manipulate and win everyone over, even staging her own death. What is particularly clever is how Stegner puts the dramatic story of Charity at the center of the composition, but interweaves it with continuous evaluations of the relationship between the two couples, of their ambitions, their mutual dependence and independence. In other words, this is actually a very reflective novel, containing very little real action, but ingeniously exploring the unique nature of long-lasting friendships and relationships such as marriage. Another plus are the endless descriptions of the arcadian nature in some spots of northwestern United States (especially Vermont). So, in the end, both aspects compensate for the all too pervading snobbish, intellectualistic slant.

n  Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.n

Welcome to Wally World. No, not the one with Chevy Chase and a stiff relation on the car roof, the one that is a place of real literary wonder. Wallace Stegner is one of our great national treasures, and Crossing to Safety is a very rich read, a surprising look at the friendship between two couples, four friends. Stegner opens with Charity, a wealthy New Englander in the last stages of cancer, bringing the foursome back together for one last hurrah. He dusts off this fossil and shows us where it came from. And in the process ponders the craft he is using to tell his story.

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?

Stegner is up front about the challenge he has presented himself. How does one write an interesting book about friendship? I suppose one begins with being able to create real people with words. But Stegner might disagree. In the book he says

you’ve got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don’t understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask questions they can answer. Those aren’t people that you see in books, those are constructs.

And yet his characters do seem real and that is why we come to care about them.


Wallace Stegner - image from Explore Big Sky

Larry is a young teacher arriving at his first job in Madison Wisconsin. He is the hard-worker, always writing, articles, stories, a novel, using every spare minute to put words to paper. His wife, Sally, had given up her college career to help Larry through his education, and is pregnant when they set up shop in town. She and Larry barely scrape by. She is probably the least defined of the four, supportive to all, but ultimately the one most in need of the support of her friends. She appears early on with canes and leg braces. We learn later how she acquired them. Sid and Charity are at the very opposite end of the financial spectrum. Sid, from Pittsburgh, inherited considerable family wealth. He is a dreamer, wanting to write his poetry, ponder the land, more of a transcendentalist than anything. Charity came from old New England money. She is the organizer, the one who must be in charge. This unlikely foursome become fast friends almost immediately, finding an Eden of mutual acceptance and admiration. The notion of Eden is one that recurs with some frequency.

From the high porch, the woods pitching down to the lake are more than a known and loved place. They are a habitat we were once fully adapted to, a sort of Peaceable Kingdom where species such as ours might evolve unchallenged and find their step on the staircase of being.

Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained arrive towards the end. In between, Sid and Charity’s first time together at her family retreat in northern Vermont, Battell Pond, is like a stroll through the first garden. An aspect of Charity’s personality is even referred to, during a multi-day hike the foursome take while in Vermont years later, as the “serpent in paradise.” Clearly the Eden of the two pairs’ friendship is not without its dangers.

Although his setting is the Northeast, mostly, instead of his beloved West, Stegner pays close attention to place.

The hemlocks like this steep shore. Like other species, they hang on to their territory

much like Charity is grown from her New England soil. Larry hankers for his birthplace in the Southwest and winds up there, but Stegner satisfies himself with some description of Wisconsin and much of Battell Pond. As the land does in his other tales, this one challenges his characters. A long hike, perhaps standing in for a life journey, is fraught with unexpected impediments, an unmapped beaver pond, storm-downed trees that force unfortunate detours. In Wisconsin, a stormy lake threatens all their lives.

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.

But Charity takes it as her mission to prevail over entropy.

Soon spring would thaw the drifts and reveal the disorder and scarred earth, and she would set to work to transform it into a landscape.

We shift between the present and the past, following the friends through the stages of their lives. The two men, both teachers, struggle with getting tenure, finding professional fulfillment and success. We also get a look into the struggles each couple experiences within their relationships. Although all four are offered the stage it is the pairing of Sid and Charity that most lights it up. Stegner offers small details that illuminate and portend. Here Larry describes an interaction with Charity.

the kiss I aimed at her cheek barely grazed her. She was not much of a kisser. She had a way of turning at the last minute and presenting a moving target.

And what happens at the end of our lives, when this friendship comes to its final chapter?

Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs. Here everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and present can hardly be told from past.

Stegner shows that there are always more shoots ready to seek the light as ancient woods bow with time, but we cross our lives to safety with the memories of our brief time here, the treasures of love and friendship. One of those treasures is having read this book.

This book is loaded with things to love. The friendship of four people, two young couples early in marriage and then much later, the husbands blossoming writers and college instructors, the wives giving moral support and advise. Sometimes unwanted and unwarranted advice -- that Charity was something else for those times, but what a wonderful character! I slowly began to realize that the things I didn't like about her were those traits similar to my own that I try to be watchful of.

Anyway, I also loved the narrator and how he toyed with us, sort of like when you watch a TV show and an actor breaks out of character to look into the camera and tell us what he really thinks, or to offer a glimpse of what lies ahead.

There are three parts to the book, and honestly when Part II began, it was like going from delight into confusion. Conversations between and about whom? Who are these people and what are they talking about? It did become clear, but I was no longer delighted. I thought it all could have been edited out or given more continuity.

Part III was excellence again and had me as close to tears as any book before (I don't typically cry over books). This is one of those that sets your mind racing. A new writer for me whom I will seek out again.

This is a master piece. I shall give a full review at a later date.

In her Introduction, Jane Smiley comments that in his late novels Stegner "dispensed with both Hemingway's fantasy of solitary masculinity and Fitzgerald's fantasy of romance." For me, Stegner is exactly the type of author I read for; I live in hope that every novel I will be in the calibre of Crossing To Safety. A well deserved 5★.

Footnote: n  n One of my all-time favorite book covers!

Beautifully written book about nothing much. A story has to be deeper for me to be interested in people who have pots of money to throw at every issue and I really, really didn't like that one of the woman characters, the only one with any real agency, was somehow to blame for everything. Three stars for the writing; otherwise, ugh.

I had the pleasure to spend some time with Larry and Sally and Sid and Charity. Two couples who meet early in their adult lives, shortly after marriage, as so much about their futures is yet to be determined. A bond forms, they feel lucky to have found each other. But no individual is perfect, and few if any marriages are perfect. Just as each of the foursome comes to learn about their self and their partner, so the couples will come to learn about each other. Stegner does another excellent job of creating characters I want to get to know, characters that seem real because they are not perfect, characters that I can like and dislike, often at the same time. I know some readers feel that nothing much happens in this novel, and I can appreciate that, but for me “life happens” here, wth its frequent mixture of joy and sadness, highs and lows. Crossing To Safety displays the subtle details of life that remind me of Stoner and Remains of the Day.

I bought this back when I saw it was included in the book club for Modern Mrs. Darcy, a book club I am not a part of because I don't think you should pay money to belong to a book club, but I do pay attention to what they read.

This is another "classic" novel of 20th century literature where I had neither read the book itself nor the author. It focuses on the friendship between two couples, where both men are professors and writers and the women have other stuff going on. How hard is it to keep friends as adults? (It's hard.) And how hard is it to find friends that are a couple that are compatible with another couple? (It's hard.)

(These are not questions asked by the author, but by me.)

“[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.”

The plot starts and ends with one of the couples making a trip to a cabin that clearly has memories attached. They are there for a picnic, and that's all you know at first, but then the time shifts back to the beginning of the story. I felt it was reflective about life and love and friendship in all the best ways.

I would recommend it for people who loved Stoner by John Williams, The Professor's House by Willa Cather, and anything by Kent Haruf. It is in that grouping of novels that so effectively examine small lives, they are rendered beautiful.