Crossing to Safety

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've found another author to add to my list of favorites. I find this book, though, difficult to review. The plot is simple: Two couples meet at graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin in the 1930's. They become close friends, more like family to each other. Larry, one of the husbands, is our narrator, and through him we become intimately acquainted with these four people. There are other minor characters, but the book is a study of these four characters, their friendship, marriages, and lives. The book starts with Larry and Sally, now in their sixties, visiting Sid and Charity, to bid farewell to Charity as she is dying of cancer. Through flashback, we read the story of these two couples. “How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?” Larry asks. It is a quiet book about four lives, and yet it is intriguing and even life- changing, as you watch how they interact and handle life. Oh posh, I'm making it sound boring! Let me just say this: Deep in my heart, I long to be an author. If I could write a novel, I would want it to be just like this one. I would want it to explore people, living their lives the best they can, interacting, loving, and caring about one another through all the ups and downs, tragedies and joys that life brings. I would want it, just as this book did to me, to make a difference in how someone views life, how they interact with loved ones and friends. I would want them to feel different and act different and be different- better, because they read the book. That is what this book did for me.
The title, "Crossing to Safety" comes from a poem by Robert Frost. The last stanza of the poem is the introduction to the book:
I could give all to Time except — except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with I have kept. -Robert Frost

That is what this book is about and mirrors my own beliefs. When we "cross to safety", when we leave this world, we can only smuggle through "customs" what we've become and the love we have in our hearts for our family and friends. Everything else will be confiscated. But these are the things with which we simply will not part.
This is a book I will want to reread in a few years- after I've read everything else Stegner has written.


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