Book #5: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

I'm trying to remember where I'd heard of Wallace Stegner before. Maybe I just vaguely remember his name from the list of Pulitzer Prize-winners (which he won for Angle of Repose, back when I was planning to read all of them [which I still might do, eventually]), but several of my aunts recommended Crossing to Safety when I asked for recommendations on Facebook and his name was recognizable enough that I wanted to check out this book as one of the first from that massive list. And I'm very happy I did--this book was a beautiful read and such a realistic look into friendships that I thoroughly enjoyed my time reading it. I didn't expect it to be one that I plowed through in a day or two, but I didn't really want to put it down after I got into the story. I was telling Tommy how I automatically sort the books I'm reading in my head into Good Literature and not good literature--just based on the quality of the writing style, basically, and how "serious" and worthy the book feels, and this definitely fell into the Good Literature category. (I love reading both types, obviously, but I love the feeling of reading high quality books that are beautifully written because it just feels enlightening and uplifting and educational even as I enjoy myself.)

The description on the back of the book is really true to what is in the book, but it totally falls flat in describing what the book is really about: "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." The couples are Larry and Sally Morgan (Larry is the narrator, and a writer himself), and Sid and Charity Lang, and the book tells the story of how they meet each other and become best friends, and the duration of their friendship over decades. So, yes, yes, it does have all that it says on the back of the book--but that doesn't encapsulate how true this book rings to real life. What I really loved was how the conversations between the characters felt so realistic, particularly those between the married couples, and how Stegner builds the relationships between the characters so gradually and so flawlessly, without telling you everything but showing you how things lay between them through their interactions. I also liked how the storyline was so un-flashy--there were no dramatic affairs or violence or any huge fireworks that are supposedly what you need to build your plot around as a writer; this was just everyday life, where friends are made so strongly and then slowly drift apart over time but still love each other fiercely. I associated so strongly with some parts of the story, like the dinner party where Sid and Charity and Larry and Sally really fall in "love" as friends, where they keep talking till the wee hours of the morning because they feel like they have found bosom friends in this other couple--whatever Stegner did to write that, I felt it and I recognized it because I have been at parties like that where you can talk about anything and you are all totally in your element and you know you are making great friends. And later, when you can just feel the strain between the parties because of who-knows-what has come between them--I can recognize that too (even without decades knowing friends!) and it all resonated strongly with me.

The narrator says, about his friends, "I didn't know myself well, and still don't. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive" (12). And that's basically what the story is about--being friends through thick and thin, through coming to know all of each other's faults, through lean times where you stay away.