Few other novels are as subtle and moving as Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner’s great novel Crossing to Safety (1987) is unusual and unexpected in so many ways. Notably, it’s one of the few works of literary fiction that I know of that is about the lifelong friendship of two adult couples. The scope of the novel is at once narrow – there really are no significant characters across the nearly 300 pages aside from the 4 in the foursome, Morgan (the narrator) and Sally Lang and their friends Sid and Charity – and wide: We see their friendship from the outset, as they meet when the two men are young professors in Madison, Wisc., and their wives are each pregnant, across a 50-year span of time to the verge of death and widowhood. The novel begins at the end – a gathering at Sid and Charity’s Vermont summer colony – and then steps back in time to the early days of their friendship. The novel has what seem like 3 “movements” – early friendship (young couples struggling to make it in academe, though notably Sid’s family is extremely wealthy, whereas the Langs are struggling), a year’s interlude together in Italy after the two men had each achieved academic tenure, and the final gathering in Vermont. But we see nothing in the interludes between these three moments; the children and other relatives are nonexistent, never see either family in a college/academic setting after the first “movement,” the friends and colleagues introduced in the Madison section of the novel disappear (until the final moments, when Morgan wonders what happened to them in the course of their lives – it’s as if he never knew them). There are a few near-tragic moments in the course of the narrative, which I won’t divulge, but Stegner handles these deftly, never for a moment pushing the narrative toward melodrama or calamity. In fact, this novel defies all expectations, as Stegner himself is well aware; in a few “postmodern” moments the narrator tells us about the work he’s composing, noting that there will be none of the expected and anticipated psycho-social dramas in a typical novel about adult couples: no infidelities, financial crises, struggles w/ children or aged parents, reversals of fortune. The tensions within the novel are twofold, and quite subtle: first, the mostly hidden rivalry and jealousy between the 2 men, as Sid feels humiliated by his lack of academic accomplishment (he does get a tenured post at Dartmouth, a clear example of the kind of academic logrolling and good-ole-boy networking prevalent then and to a degree still) in comparison w/ the more ambitious and talented Morgan (Sid doesn’t have to work at all, of course, which is part of the problem); and second, the dawning recognition that Charity, energetic, intelligent, a great entertainer, is a controlling and hard-headed woman who has made Sid’s seemingly idyllic life into a hell of misplaced ambition: She’s pushed him too far and made him feel like a failure. The novel as a whole is subtle at all times, and in the end deeply sad without being sentimental or mawkish for even a moment. Though it's narrow in scope - anything but diverse! - there are few other novels as subtle and moving this one.