Crossing to Safety

author
Wallace Stegner

plot synopsis in 50 words or fewer
The story of a life-long friendship between two couples, the Langs and the Morgans.

what really matters
In many ways, this book is about nothing. And yet. In its telling, it paints a universal picutre of one's attempts to fill one's life with joy and meaning. It is wise about the compromises we make for contenment and grace, and looks uncompromisingly at the ways life, at times, fails us.

what i thought
Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. An action-packed adventure novel, this ain't. If you can handle that then you're in for an emotionally intense, and deeply affecting read. Crossing to Safety really hits home because of the "mundane" subject matter: it could be your life, your emotions, your pitfalls.
Stegner's focus with this book is no less than life itself. He pushes the reader to look at the details that make up friendships, relationships, joy, fulfillment, professional satisfaction, and self-worth--and like bricks on a path, he lays them out one by one, making up the sum of his character's lives. The word for this book is beautiful. Beautiful, and quiet. Crossing to Safety endures, reamaining timely and wise.

so you can see how great the writing is
Sally knows I wrote the last chapter of this book in tears, typing as fast as I could and unable to type as fast as the words wanted to come. She knows I wept some more, revising it. It has been corked up a good while--the story of my decent, undistinguished, affectionate, abruptly dead father and mother, and the glamorous friend who periodically brought excitement, adventure, and romance into our home in Albuquerque; who kept them up late with stories of far places, who used them, and sponged on them, and borrowed money from them that they knew he would never pay back, and who finally, in one of his large gestures of half-drunken good will, took them up for an anniversary joyride in a plane that should have been in the shop. Then ending was appropriate for him but not for them. It was not the right reward for generosity and devotion.

Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

who else loved this book (or at least, say they did)
Everyone--it's Stegner.

some other things this author has written
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
Joe Hill
All The Little Live Things
Angle of Repose, (Pulitzer Prize)
The Spectator Bird, (National Book Award
Recapitulation
Collected Stories
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
Wolf Willow
The Sound of Mountain Water
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West