Reviews

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

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kamikatarian's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

dilemmag's review against another edition

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4.0

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are fine.”

elizabethfisher's review against another edition

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4.0

This is a beautiful and understated novel about two married couples who become incredibly close friends, set between 1938 and 1972. The story focuses on the quiet moments of life told from the perspective of Larry, a gifted writer (very possibly a stand-in for Stegner telling some version of his own life). Thus the story reflects the prevailing perspectives of an upper middle class white man with its misogyny and sense of privilege and superiority included. If you can read this as a story from the singular perspective of its flawed and perhaps unreliable narrator (which I’m not saying is the correct or best way to read it), then you’re in for beautiful prose and a moving story of life, found family, and the grief and pain that comes along with it. Otherwise, the story is hopelessly stuck in a worldview many of us would find problematic today. My main complaint about this book is the one dimensionality of the women in the story, particularly Sally. I would recommend this one to people who love character-driven novels and who are looking for one that isn’t tragic and full of scandal or drama.

Shoutout to the FictionMatters book club for deepening my understanding of this book.

bhnmt61's review against another edition

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5.0

This is the second time I've read Crossing to Safety. The first was twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, I could admire the writing, but I couldn't get past how much I hated the manipulative, overbearing, controlling Charity, whose personality seemed to dominate the book as much as she did the people around her. I might have given it three stars at best.

But this time through, although I still disliked Charity with a surprisingly visceral intensity, I was much more aware of the other characters in the book. Stegner is brilliant in his ability to draw characters. Even characters with bit parts- the cancer nurse, the adult daughter and son-in-law we don't meet till the end- have a decided presence. Charity is the linchpin around which this novel is built, but in the end, she is far less interesting than the three other main characters- her husband Sid, and their best friends Sally and Larry. (Larry, who seems to be at least a somewhat autobiographical character for Stegner, narrates the story in first person.)

If like me you've been married for a very long time to the same person, as both couples in this book have been, you can't help but think about ways your marriage is Sid&Charity's, how much of your mutual life is dependence and coercion, when have you been Charity to your partner's Sid and vice versa. Or like Larry and Sally, how much have you sacrificed, where would you be without the other? Is it even reasonable to try to imagine a different outcome and what would be the point? And yet you wouldn't be who you are without the marriage that has shaped you. A brilliant book, absorbing, maddening, thought-provoking.

jaimebz's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

jrmarr's review

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4.0

Sometimes I can't identify why I enjoy a book so much. This book seems like it falls into a category I don't always enjoy, but for some reason it just got me from the first page. I really enjoyed Stegner's writing, and found myself drawn into the lives of these four characters. I'm glad I read it.