Crossing to Safety

Having already won a Pulitzer for Angle of Repose and a National Book Award for The Spectator Bird, Wallace Stegner crafted this loving reflection on friendship and the vicissitudes of life. I read this book decades ago, have recommended it to many and, in the process, lost my own copy. So I re-purchased the book and re-read it for one of my book groups. The lyrical language and the portrayal of the main characters grabbed me as firmly as they did the first time around. The first sentence is illustrative of his magic with words: "Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eye open. I am awake."

Two couples meet in Madison Wisconsin through their husbands who are novice faculty/ instructors in the university's English department. Sid and Charity Lang come from east coast social class and money. Larry and Sally Morgan are poor westerners, yet somehow they bond, largely through the effusive and generous efforts of Charity. Both Charity and Sally are pregnant, due to deliver at the same time and so the baby delivery derby is on. Sid and Larry share long walks to talk over the multiple obstacles they face to find permanent employment in the middle of the Depression (1937). Both feel the university offers promise. Sid wants to write poetry but his wife drives him to write academia; whereas Sally supports Larry fiction writing passion. They both have to teach to earn their chops. During the good times they share, the two couples feel they are the "four in Eden.'' But, in Eden, there was also a serpent in the grass and in this case it is Charity's drive to make her husband into something he is not. "...headstrong, insufferably well-organized Charity tries to bully the passive Sid into a more aggressive mold. Charity is one of the most vivid characters in fiction; if she is arrogant, she is also kindhearted, enthusiastic, stalwart and brave--an ardent liver of life. Her incandescent personality is both the dominant force and the source of strain in the enduring friendship Stegner conveys with brilliant artistry (Publishers Weekly).

Publishers Weekly calls the book "a meditation on the idealism and spirit of youth, when the world is full of promise, and on the blows and compromises life inevitably inflicts..." and goes on to assert that Stegner "has created a believable human drama the dimensions of which reach out beyond the story's end and resonate in the reader's heart." Library Journal closes their review by saying, "This is a wonderfully rich, warm, and affecting book. Highly recommended." To be fair, I include the comments from Kirkus' less than laudatory review which opens and closes with the following: "Stegner takes a long look back—at four decades of a foursome's life—in a novel that at moments is beguiling, though at others it labors for its theme... Stegner clings to his theme of undying friendship beyond the point where his material keeps it alive, leading him to an often visibly artificial and conventionalized effort to push things along to their end. In all, less moving as a whole piece than highly remarkable for the fine penetration and achievement of some of its moments." I still thought the journey was worth it, precisely because of those moments.