Crossing to Safety (Modern Library)

by Wallace Stegner

Tempest Williams (Introduction), Terry Tempest Williams (Introduction), and T.H. Watkins (Afterword)

Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams
Afterword by T. H. Watkins
 
Called a “magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom” by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.

• ISBN10: 037575931X
• ISBN13: 9780375759314
• Publish Date: 9 April 2002 (first published June 1989)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Random House Inc
• Edition: New edition
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 368
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780375759314

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Stegner, here, might be the example of Paul Bowles’ opposite, the book you praise for its sentences when it doesn’t quite add up to something more. The whole time I kept thinking, this should be just my thing— forgoing blatant dramatic convention in favor of the more realistic struggles of life— but there was just something lacking, something that kept bugging me.

And I think what it comes down to is the first person narrator. That voice is so difficult to pull off: to do it, you have to be kind, but you also have to be ruthless. When instead it’s rosy, when it conveys nothing but warmth, when it recounts decades of friendship with a bias of affection, it feels unreliable, a history that’s been glossed and polished. Which is what’s so difficult to pin down, because likely that’s the honest story— it would be more wrong to introduce drama or conflict just for drama’s sake. So maybe, here, it’s not the plot or action (or lack thereof) at fault, it’s the voice. You need some detachment and objectivity if you’re meant to believe something so good. All that first-person sainthood just comes off feeling suspicious, not honest.

Hey, who am I to tell anyone like Stegner how to write, and there’s a whole bounty of beautiful sentences here to prove he knows what he’s doing. But they can’t help it, all that beauty builds up around a core that just seems a little too enchanted, a little too hollow.