Crossing to Safety

Stegner floats seamlessly between past and present, his narrator telling the storied, loving, conflicted friendship of two couples: that of he and his wife and their best friends of forty-odd years. It's the hills and valleys of our lives, and what passes between us.

Few things put me off more in a novel than a protagonist I can’t relate to. With this book, though, it’s precisely the nuance of the unreliability of Charity—the female main character—that conquered me. Her bossy yet loving attitude toward her husband, children, and friends worked like a magnet. I was fascinated by her continuous shifts to and fro the ideal woman and the nightmare of a wife.

In this novel, I admired Stegner’s ability to give depth to his characters—Charity, in particular. Under different circumstances (a different story or writing style), her slap-me-across-the-face attitude might have made me throw… show more.

Often, there’s a bias when picking book club books to go big. Big stories. Big titles. Epics. Challenges. But sometimes, the best read is something smaller. Shorter. More personal. Crossing to Safety is a book like that…a perfect, beautifully written story about the friendship between two couples over the course of their lives. Read this book, and inevitably the book club discussion will turn to the very nature of your own relationships, friendships, and how those evolve and change over the decades, as people age, circumstances change, and the bonds are tested. There aren’t a lot of books in our… show more.

The retrospective gaze in this semiautobiographical novel zeroes in on friendship rather than family or romantic love. The friendship between the struggling-to-rise Morgans and the blue-blooded Langs, nearly academic royalty, is instantaneous and deep, with an imbalance that creates a delicious sense of precariousness. Stegner is a master of low-key suspense, gently stoking our curiosity about what comes next and what makes these people tick. Known for his California-based masterpiece Angle of Repose, here Stegner ventures into the Midwest, New England, and Italy, into academia, into aspiration and longing, and the forces that can alter a friendship. I love that… show more.