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.
There are some books that seem to have tiny leaks in their spines and covers and pages and release almost unnoticeable misty, smoky particles of their story – well not so much their story but the mood that is created by the story – out into the “real” world. And when reading these books you find – or at least I find (I should shift my point of reference to me not you) that I am seeing things in my daily routine through a sort of cloud that at first I don’t recognize but then suddenly it dawns on me that it’s from the book I’m reading! My dreams are affected, my relationships are affected, my perception of self is affected, and my writing style and speaking style change – all because of the fumes from this book seepage. And Crossing to Safety has seepage. This is a book about a lifestyle that I really can’t relate to. But yet now I’ve been to these well orchestrated family picnics at Battell Pond, the Vermont compound belonging to Charity Lang’s family. I’ve ridden in the back of the Marmon with the coolers full of steaks for the grills. And I walked the hundred-mile back roads behind the horse named Wizard wondering if there were two stashes of tea in his pack. I even went to Florence back when you could just waltz into the Uffizi without standing in hour-long lines constantly being approached by ‘brella salesmen. I spent time in an iron lung with my dearest friend by my side assuring me that life was worth living even though I wished it was over. But most of all – what this gaseous cloud of literary filter did for me - was to confirm that good and bad make the whole; that friends, husbands, children and oh yes! don’t forget myself – all can have insufferable habits, be full of faults, clearly be imperfect – but without these “bad” qualities – they would not be the people we love. Here’s the quote from the book that illustrates this best: After spending a lovely day in the Tuscan countryside that ends with rescuing an Italian worker from a horrible accident and transporting him back to his village with a crushed, bleeding hand, Larry asks Sally, “When you remember today, what will you remember best, the spring countryside, and the company of friends, or Piero’s Christ and that workman with the mangled hand?”She thought a minute. “All of it,” she said. “it wouldn’t be complete or real if you left out any part of it, would it?”“Go to the head of the class,” I said.This is a move-to-the-top-of your-list book!
What do You think about Crossing To Safety (2002)?
There are some books were you can tell within the first few paragraphs that you are entering a safe zone in which something magical is about to happen. Such is the sensitivity and emotion of Stegner's prose wrote with such wonderful eye to language that Crossing To Safety is such a story.Crossing To Safety is the story of a friendship between two couples, and their journeys through all that life can throw at them. Narrated by the perspective of the modern day and old aged Larry Morgan, now a successful writer, talks of when his life began, teaching English, slowly working away at stories and starting a family with his wife, Sally. After arriving at the University of Wisconsin there lives will be changed forever after being befriended by the rich and gregarious Sid and Charity Lang. Despite seemingly having it all with children, money, love, security and success it soon becomes apparent that they wan't nothing more than to share those things with the Morgans. Larry and Sally are so touched by the Lang's friendship they name there first child, a girl Lang after them.The two couple's will see the highs with lavish parties to the lows of life such as Sally contracting polio wich leaves her crippled and relying on calipers to move and Charity's cancer that puts much strain on Sid later on when it is clear that the illness is terminal. Despite the stories facility for language being of the chart every word is created with such beauty that the reader will never feel that the author is trying to showoff and is handled with great subtlety. If you do decide to read this book then i can't stress enough you will need a box of tissues handy and preferably a full one as the emotion jumps of the page. I don't use the word perfection often but this book is as close to it as i have read. Simply a beautiful story of ordinary lives were unbridled happiness and unbearable sorrow combine to make something truly magnificent.
—Michael
Struggling writer gets immediate recognition, Guggenheim fellowship, and critical success. Wealthy poet never achieves recognition, depends on the help of more successful once-poor writer friend, and ends up a failure in career and poetic ambitions. I couldn't find a narrator I disliked more in recent memory, with his pretension and self-congratulatory smugness: and I don't even think Stegner intended to make him so unappealing. Also, the fact we have to wait so long to find out what ailed the w
—Yulia
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.
—Chris
