Crossing to Safety by Wallace StegnerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction? The people we are talking about are hangovers from a quieter time... their intelligence and civilized tradition protect them from most of the temptations, indiscretions, vulgarities, and passionate errors that pester and perturb most of us."
With all this chaos in the world around us, it was so nice to read an outwardly "simple" novel that can be summarized in one sentence: the intertwined lives of two college professors and their wives as they battled the Great Depression and the indignities of class struggle and illness. This novel is about their transcending all of this, about the beauties that friends and literature and art can bring even to a miserable era.
There is no melodrama here, no inappropriate embraces, no sordid affair. But Stegner's masterful writing shows us that life is precious enough: the dignity of honest work, the strength within men (and women!) to face misfortune head on, the joys of friendship that illuminates the passage of time with blessed companionship sanctifying life's milestones.
Be warned: The ending will have you weeping. Guaranteed.
"We're all decent godless people. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's already been enough of that."
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