Stegner's "Crossing to Safety" is a quiet, mostly internalized book about friendship and self-discovery, and dealing with what life throws at us. It centers on two couples whom we meet at the beginnings of their careers â the men both instructors in a small Wisconsin college, the wives both beginning pregnancies â Sally's first and Charity's third. That coincidence of meeting at that time in their lives, under those circumstances, sets in motion a deep and abiding friendship that spans decades and brings them, at last, to an inevitable parting as one of the four faces life's end, each in their own characteristic and unique way.
To me, Charity Lang was the most interesting character. It is certainly she who drives most of the action â rushing into what seems an impetuous marriage and then taking her husband's career in hand, driving the friendship between the Langs and the Morgans through actions large and small, ranging from incredibly generous to utterly self-serving. Charity wants to run things. She is intelligent and organized, irresistable on a force-of-nature scale, and driven to have events and individuals line up just so. And perhaps the most infuriating thing about her is that she is so often right, even when the targets of her indomitable will think they want something entirely different than she has in mind for them. Is she a monster? Is she a mother-hen? Utterly selfish, or ultimately selfless?
That's part of the fascination, and it all unfolds in Stegner's impeccable prose. This is writing that does not knock your socks off. Rather it knits itself around your soul, cocooning and protecting and warming and sometimes threatening to smother. And then Stegner will step back and put to paper the very questions the reader may have been asking â âHow do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that 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?â
Because none of these things are present in âCrossing to Safetyâ. And yet one does want to read it. Wants to know how these very approachable characters will organically grow into each others' lives and make them fuller and richer and more satisfying. Wants to get through the heartbreak of loss and resolve the anger one feels toward the ways in which we try, each in our own way, to manage the end of our lives.
But this is not a book about death. It's a book about life, with its pleasures and pains and the way it can intertwine with other lives in enriching and unexpected ways. About the difference between burden and blessing, and about those essential, unchanging memories, qualities, beliefs that we carry with us all our lives, through whatever crossings fortune throws at us as we seek shelter and safety and completion.
To me, Charity Lang was the most interesting character. It is certainly she who drives most of the action â rushing into what seems an impetuous marriage and then taking her husband's career in hand, driving the friendship between the Langs and the Morgans through actions large and small, ranging from incredibly generous to utterly self-serving. Charity wants to run things. She is intelligent and organized, irresistable on a force-of-nature scale, and driven to have events and individuals line up just so. And perhaps the most infuriating thing about her is that she is so often right, even when the targets of her indomitable will think they want something entirely different than she has in mind for them. Is she a monster? Is she a mother-hen? Utterly selfish, or ultimately selfless?
That's part of the fascination, and it all unfolds in Stegner's impeccable prose. This is writing that does not knock your socks off. Rather it knits itself around your soul, cocooning and protecting and warming and sometimes threatening to smother. And then Stegner will step back and put to paper the very questions the reader may have been asking â âHow do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that 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?â
Because none of these things are present in âCrossing to Safetyâ. And yet one does want to read it. Wants to know how these very approachable characters will organically grow into each others' lives and make them fuller and richer and more satisfying. Wants to get through the heartbreak of loss and resolve the anger one feels toward the ways in which we try, each in our own way, to manage the end of our lives.
But this is not a book about death. It's a book about life, with its pleasures and pains and the way it can intertwine with other lives in enriching and unexpected ways. About the difference between burden and blessing, and about those essential, unchanging memories, qualities, beliefs that we carry with us all our lives, through whatever crossings fortune throws at us as we seek shelter and safety and completion.
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