Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Description

From one of the finest writers of our time comes this luminous story of a lifelong friendship between two couples, the Morgans and the Langs. With his customary grace and power, Stegner evokes the dense web of feeling and experience that binds these people together—joy and sorrow, fulfillment and frustration, anger and forgiveness, suffering and survival. Crossing to Safety is a storytelling marvel, and a stirring affirmation of life in all its complexity, pain, and wonder.

Editorial Review

It's deceptively simple: two bright young couples meet during the Depression and form an instant and lifelong friendship. “How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?” Larry Morgan, a successful novelist and the narrator of the story, poses that question many years after he and his wife, Sally, have befriended the vibrant, wealthy, and often troubled Sid and Charity Lang. “Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish?” It's not here. What is here is just as fascinating, just as compelling, as touching, and as tragic.

Crossing to Safety is about loyalty and survival in its most everyday form–the need to create bonds and the urge to tear them apart. Thirty-four years after their first meeting, when Larry and Sally are called back to the Langs' summer home in Vermont, it's as if for a final showdown. How has this friendship defined them? What is its legacy? Stegner offer answers in those small, perfectly rendered moments that make up lives “as quiet as these”–and as familiar as our own. –Sara Nickerson