Rating: 
Summary: Modern English at its best!
Review: Stegner is a master of the English language. He is able to give you a complete feeling of being present with his characters. You learn about the people, the setting, the mood and you feel part of it. Compared to Angle of Repose, this is uplifting and will make you feel at peace. It is a novel that describes the struggles and defeats of life, but promotes an acceptance and a finding of beauty in even the most mundane of circumstances. As one of the characters in the book mentions, this book is about ordinary (and yet rather rich) people who experience everything a normal human does. Stegner makes it interesting to watch ordinary life unfold in the characters. And gives you rich prose that creates a whole world into which you can immerse yourself and become familiar with.
Rating:
Summary: Warm-hearted book with a devestating ending
Review: Warm-hearted book with a devastating ending"Crossing to Safety" is Stegner's swan song, his last novel. It does have a bittersweet, nostalgic feel to it, written from the perspective of an old writer/professor, much like Stegner, near the end of his life and looking back on what came before. The plot of the book involves the enduring friendship of two young couples, wed in the 1930s. Sid is a likeable fellow who struggles to gain academic acceptance and tenure, married to Charity, a well-to-do extrovert who micromanages his career. Larry, the narrator, is a naturally gifted novelist, married to the sweet-tempered Sally. The novel follows their lives through small wins (the acceptance of a novel) and near tragedies. This part moves in a smooth, elegiac way-you get the sense of Stegner's genuine affection for these characters-but I did not find the characters exceptional in any way. I confess, for example, to getting a small bee in my bonnet about the complete absence of the couples' children from most of the narrative. Sid and Charity's five kids and Larry and Sally's daughter are generally off-stage, under the care of a nanny. But then a kind of tidal wave hits, with all the skill Stegner can muster. The impending death of one of the characters brings out the conflicts inherent in even the most enduring of marriages; I know of no place in literature where the joys and sorrows of a marriage are portrayed with such precision and intensity. The way kindness and inadvertent cruelty seem all knotted up together; the way you can't live life apart; the way the intense abiding love of one person also makes you terribly vulnerable. These Stegner gets exactly, truly right. Read through to this remarkable end; it will be worthwhile.
Rating: 
Summary: Simply - A Masterpiece!
Review: Wallace Stegner's luminous prose and subtle, nuanced story of relationships make "Crossing To Safety" one of my favorite books and, I believe, Stegner's best work. If you love a beautifully crafted novel and find joy in the written word, this masterpiece is a must read.
The plot is a simple one. The author writes of the forty-year friendship between two couples, the Langs and the Morgans. They meet during the Depression at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where both men have teaching jobs in the English Department. Their young wives are both pregnant. From the very first the four find they have worlds in common, in spite of their very different backgrounds. The bond between them becomes so strong, so quickly, that when the Morgan's daughter is born, she is named Lang. Larry Morgan, a successful novelist, narrates. He looks back at the lifelong friendship, the intertwined lives of the four, the shared coming of age experience, the complexities and dependencies of marriage, and muses on loyalty, vulnerability, conflict, kindness and love. Although the story spans decades, there are few sensational or dramatic incidents. This may disappoint some. However, Stegner makes his point by this very lack of action and/or heroism. Morgan, the writer, at one point thinks: "How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are speed, noise, ugliness...everything that makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?" At another point, Charity Lang asks Morgan: "Why don't you just ignore all that stuff so many modern writers concentrate on, and write something about a really decent, kind, good human being living a normal life in a normal community...?"
From these four lives the author paints a vivid portrait of a friendship and illustrates that even ordinary lives carry the possibility of great drama. This is truly a magnificent and moving novel.
JANA
Rating:
Summary: Diverse couples form a complexity of relationships.
Review: Every man and woman must pause near the end of their days and contemplate what has gone before, how it was good and how it could have been better, the paths chosen and the ones passed by. "Crossing to Safety" is the story of a novelist, reaching old age, doing just that. The book revolves around a friendship between two couples, enduring but often fragmented, as the vagaries of their careers and the varying fortunes of the twentieth century carry them between locales and from good fortune to bad and back. The book addresses the entire married lives of its characters, a span of some 35 years in which they achieve varying degrees of success and failure and, ultimately, all grow old. It is this 35-year span, in a book of under 300 pages, that defines the novel. Stegner's prose is poignant and specific, and scenes are described with painstaking lushness, but in a novel of this moderate length there are not many scenes. Most of the story is told in restrospect, and the narrator skims over years and decades the way an old man telling a story might. The tale is not of four lives and fortunes but about the link between them, and the story dwells in the months and years when the couples' friendship is strongest. One of the novel's peculiarities is the distance it holds the reader at, an analytic perspective that asks the us to think about life along with the narrator, but not to experience the emotional events of the book. This makes the book thought-provoking but less compelling, in a visceral, page-turning sense, than it could have been. And the thoughts the book provokes are not, as might be expected, about the nature and beauty of lifelong friendship. Ultimately, each character, each person, is an entity unto himself. In the end, everyone is isolated and everyone must decide for himself what, if anything, has made his life worth living.
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