Crossing to Safety

I started reading Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner for the very pedestrian reason that it was available for Kindle download from the library, but within the first few pages, I was utterly absorbed. Stegner wrote his first novel in 1937. Fifty years later, he published Crossing to Safety when he was in his late seventies. I loved this book so much — I doubt anything else I read this summer (maybe this year) will surpass it.

Crossing to Safety is the story of two couples and their friendship over decades, with meditations on marriage, friendship, art, and ambition. You will enjoy this book as much as I did if you appreciate

• Complex, nuanced, compelling characters
• Beautiful writing about nature
• Canny observations about aging and how relationships evolve over time

Here’s the New York Times review of Crossing to Safety from September 20, 1987.

Reading Crossing to Safety got me started on a Stegner jag. I read his book on writing and teaching fiction and am currently making my way through the autobiographical work, Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier, which is wonderful in its own way, especially if you’re interested in a rather protracted history of the hardscrabble life on the plains of Saskatchewan.

Stegner’s most famous book is probably Angle of Repose, which I also highly recommend. I’m going to take his semi-autobiographical work, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, with me on our family trip to San Diego, along with Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, a used book I picked up eons ago.

If I get through those books, I will have read a fraction of Stegner’s works. He wrote more than thirty novels, story collections, and nonfiction books.