jamiereadthis's Review of Crossing to Safety (Modern Library)

by Wallace Stegner

A novel of the friendships and woes of two couples, which tells the story of their lives in lyrical, evocative prose by one of the finest American writers of the late 20th century.

When two young couples meet for the first time during the Great Depression, they quickly find they have much in common: Charity Lang and Sally Morgan are both pregnant, while their husbands Sid and Larry both have jobs in the English department at the University of Wisconsin. Immediately a lifelong friendship is born, which becomes increasingly complex as they share decades of love, loyalty, vulnerability and conflict. Written from the perspective of the aging Larry Morgan,Crossing to Safety is a beautiful and deeply moving exploration of the struggle of four people to come to terms with the trials and tragedies of everyday life.

With an introduction by Jane Smiley.

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose (Pulitzer Prize), 1971; The Spectator Bird (National Book award), 1977; Recapitulation, 1979. Three of his short stories have won O.Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His collected stories were published in 1990.

Jane Smiley is the author of many novels and works of non-fiction, including, most recently, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel", about the history and anatomy of the novel. Her most recent novel is "Good Faith". She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for "A Thousand Acres", and was shortlisted for The Orange Prize in 2001 for Horse Heaven.

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.

Crossing to Safety (Modern Library)

by Wallace Stegner

Reviewed by jamiereadthis on Feb 23, 2011

Reading updates