Crossing to Safety: Wallace Stegner (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Sally is still sleeping. I slide out of bed and go barefooted across the cold wooden floor. The calendar, as I pass it, insists that it is not the one I remember. It says, accurately, that it is 1972, and that the month is August.

JASON STEGER: It's beautifully done. You know how you read fiction, and you sort of get empathy from fiction, I think. But with this one, I felt envy. I felt envy for these characters. They go through some, sort of, tough times, but it's how they deal with it that is so marvellous. JENNIFER BYRNE: I think that goes to your point, Charlotte, that it is a bit about... it is a lost world. I mean, towards the end, Larry the narrator, who's one of the four people in the couples, he says something like, 'We all hoped to define and illustrate the worthy life.' And who would write that now? Who would even talk about going for 'the worthy life'? verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ My feet take me up the road to the gate, and through it. Just inside the gate the road forks. I ignore the Ridge House road and choose instead the narrow dirt road that climbs around the hill to the right. John Wightman, whose cottage sits at the end of it, died fifteen years ago. He will not be up to protest my walking in his ruts. It is a road I have walked hundreds of times, a lovely lost tunnel through the trees, busy this morning with birds and little shy rustling things, my favorite road anywhere.

Retirees Joseph and Ruth Allston find their placid, rural California life disrupted by a hippie who builds a treehouse on their property and by a young married couple tragically affected by pregnancy Continue reading » Fiction Book Review: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Earle Stegner". PublishersWeekly.com. 1987-08-04. JASON STEGER: She is capable of great generosity, but she's pretty... She'd be driving you bonkers, wouldn't she?

There is even, as my eyes make better use of the dusk and I lift my head off the pillow to look around, something marvelously reassuring about the room, a warmth even in the gloom. Associations, probably, but also color. The unfinished pine of the walls and ceilings has mellowed, over the years, to a rich honey color, as if stained by the warmth of the people who built it into a shelter for their friends. I take it as an omen; and though I remind myself why we are here, I can’t shake the sense of loved familiarity into which I just awoke. JASON STEGER: But it was what, 50 years after his first story, or first book came out. It's clearly the work of somebody who's had a huge amount of experience. GEOFFREY COUSINS: She's really the fulcrum of the book, isn't she, Charity? She's the dominating personality, domineering in some respect, but still wonderfully, when you think of what she actually does for people. You know, the generosity of spirit she shows, as controlling as she is, is fantastic. She basically builds the lives of the other couple. For a minute I stand listening to her breathing, wondering if I dare go out and leave her. But she is deeply asleep, and should stay that way for a while. No one is going to be coming around at this hour. This early piece of the morning is mine. Tiptoeing, I go out onto the porch and stand exposed to what, for all my senses can tell me, might as well be 1938 as 1972.Stegner's powerful but unassuming narrative traces the bond that develops between the Langs and the Morgans from their first meeting in 1937 through their eventual separation on the occasion of Charity's death from cancer. An undistinguished writing professor at Stanford when he was commissioned by the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in 1955 to write ""an approved history of the oil venture's early days,"" future Continue reading »