You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.1 AVERAGE
4.1 AVERAGE
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
reflective
slow-paced
Beautiful book, wonderful writing, a slow wander through friendship
I listened to it this time and feel gutted all over again.
Quiet and true and charming and implicitly devastating. So subtly remarkable that passages and images require that the dust settle first.
Beautiful portraits of people and the relationships and stories that bind them together.
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
How is it I have never read Stegner. This is a beautifully written book about real friendships and real marriages.
Beautifully written with wonderful observations about friendship and marriage. Highly recommended.
Crossing to Safety was my first Stegner. I found the narrative oddly paced, seeming to spend very little time dwelling on events I found compelling and much more time on conversations somewhat near the happenings. Big things were glossed over, like the main characters' entire lives as parents, or the experience of enduring and recovering from polio. (I don't think this is a spoiler--I believe that when the book was published, almost all American adults would have read the description of the leg braces on p.10 and assumed polio to be the cause.) Reading this novel felt like watching a movie where the camera was always pointed someplace other than at what I wanted to see. But my objections run much deeper than this.
According to articles I have read about the book, the narrator, Larry, and his wife, Sally, are loosely modeled on the author and his wife, and Sid and Charity Lang are modeled on friends they had for decades. By this interpretation, Larry and Sally are supposed to be stand-ins for the readers, fairly bland characters that we can look through as a way to see the Langs. The thing is, I found Larry to be disdainful and judgmental, very hard to like. Sally would have been more properly named Mary Sue: she is supportive and unquestioning when Larry is struggling, brave when her situation is grim, brilliant just when most convenient, and anything else that is needed at any given time.
The two of them sit in judgment of their "friend," Charity, whom Larry sees as sometimes cruelly controlling. They judge while fully enjoying the perks of this friendship: vacation home, free childcare, society of academic elites in many fields, professional connections. And they judge without taking much action to change the negative behaviors they feel they are seeing.
As for Charity, she seems like a victim of her time and class. She is presented as a driven, hyper-organized, outgoing woman who genuinely wants to help people she feels are in need. Born to a working-class family, she would have been a nurse; born more recently, she would have been a hospital administrator (and, more rare, a good one). Without an outlet outside the home, she makes being her husband's wife into a career of its own. This puts a lot of pressure on her husband to excel at his job, and makes it difficult for Charity to cope when Sid does not live up to the standard Charity has set for their husband-and-wife team. Larry passes judgment while doing very little to help Charity see what she is doing to her husband. In this book, apparently, friends give, they take, they hang out, but they do very little straightforward talking.
And Larry sits back and judges. In the painful goodbye scene between Charity and Sid, Larry ascribes disdainful, unfriendly motives to every sentence Charity utters or movement she makes. Take the words without his commentary, pair them with the knowledge that Charity then cries throughout the 80-mile drive to the hospice, and the love within the relationship becomes starkly visible, along with Charity's fear and hurt at the idea of causing pain in anyone she loves. If there were any signal that Stegner had meant to write an unreliable narrator, I would have enjoyed all of this a lot more. Instead, it reads as though Stegner thought Larry was seeing clearly and speaking truths, which makes the messages in this book come from places of pettiness and weakness. I don't plan to read Stegner again anytime soon.
According to articles I have read about the book, the narrator, Larry, and his wife, Sally, are loosely modeled on the author and his wife, and Sid and Charity Lang are modeled on friends they had for decades. By this interpretation, Larry and Sally are supposed to be stand-ins for the readers, fairly bland characters that we can look through as a way to see the Langs. The thing is, I found Larry to be disdainful and judgmental, very hard to like. Sally would have been more properly named Mary Sue: she is supportive and unquestioning when Larry is struggling, brave when her situation is grim, brilliant just when most convenient, and anything else that is needed at any given time.
The two of them sit in judgment of their "friend," Charity, whom Larry sees as sometimes cruelly controlling. They judge while fully enjoying the perks of this friendship: vacation home, free childcare, society of academic elites in many fields, professional connections. And they judge without taking much action to change the negative behaviors they feel they are seeing.
Spoiler
In one particularly painful scene, in which Charity insists on going forward with her after-dinner plans while Sid is still washing dishes, Larry and Sally apparently feel their discomfort strongly but express it weakly. No one says flat-out, "Charity, this has been a wonderful dinner, but I won't be able to enjoy this record without Sid here, too. I'd feel better about knowing he was doing dishes if I were helping him out, but if you object to that, I'm willing to stay here and listen to something else. Let's save the new record for half an hour from now, when Sid can join us." No one manages to be straightforward, or to confront Charity on the significance of her actions, so according to the structure of the book, Larry continues harboring hard feelings about Charity's behavior that night for the next 30 years. He doesn't seem to be a good "friend" to Sid, either. One of the recurring problems Sid faces is his inability to get academic work published. We find out that Larry has known for decades that Sid's writing is amateur, with ideas better suited to undergraduate papers. Not only does he never take his friend aside to give him any help in crafting better ideas, but after Sid's retirement, Larry discusses Sid's failures candidly with one of Sid's children, behind his back.As for Charity, she seems like a victim of her time and class. She is presented as a driven, hyper-organized, outgoing woman who genuinely wants to help people she feels are in need. Born to a working-class family, she would have been a nurse; born more recently, she would have been a hospital administrator (and, more rare, a good one). Without an outlet outside the home, she makes being her husband's wife into a career of its own. This puts a lot of pressure on her husband to excel at his job, and makes it difficult for Charity to cope when Sid does not live up to the standard Charity has set for their husband-and-wife team. Larry passes judgment while doing very little to help Charity see what she is doing to her husband. In this book, apparently, friends give, they take, they hang out, but they do very little straightforward talking.
And Larry sits back and judges. In the painful goodbye scene between Charity and Sid, Larry ascribes disdainful, unfriendly motives to every sentence Charity utters or movement she makes. Take the words without his commentary, pair them with the knowledge that Charity then cries throughout the 80-mile drive to the hospice, and the love within the relationship becomes starkly visible, along with Charity's fear and hurt at the idea of causing pain in anyone she loves.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Forget the dark academia trend...just give me "regular academia". While this story only briefly touches on the colleges Larry and his friend Sid teach at, it kept that collegiate feel through out. I enjoyed all the professor talk even if that wasn't the core of the novel.
<i>Crossing to Safety</i> was about friendship and family. This story was so real - I felt like I was reading the true tale of a friendship Stegner had. Neither couple in the story did anything cruel to the other - there was no big falling out, just the natural ups and downs of an adult friendship. Both couples were always cordial and loving to each other. While I really enjoyed reading about a friendship that isn't marked by drama, the best part of this story was Larry's love for his wife Sally who defeats polio but remains in crutches because of it. It was all admiration and no pity.
This was so authentic and wonderfully written, a solid if quiet way to start out a new reading year.
<i>Crossing to Safety</i> was about friendship and family. This story was so real - I felt like I was reading the true tale of a friendship Stegner had. Neither couple in the story did anything cruel to the other - there was no big falling out, just the natural ups and downs of an adult friendship. Both couples were always cordial and loving to each other. While I really enjoyed reading about a friendship that isn't marked by drama, the best part of this story was Larry's love for his wife Sally who defeats polio but remains in crutches because of it. It was all admiration and no pity.
This was so authentic and wonderfully written, a solid if quiet way to start out a new reading year.