Crossing to Safety: Wallace Stegner (Penguin Modern Classics)

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It is at first disconcerting that the narrator sounds half the age of the author's narrator: Lyman Ward is an elderly, severely crippled historian at odds with his wife and children over his Continue reading » These 31 classic stories record much of the cultural climate of 20th-century America, its West in particular, constituting, as the NBA and Pulitzer Prize-winning author affectionately notes, not an Continue reading » JASON STEGER: Yeah, I can't disagree with anything. I find that there's something wonderful about it.

Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake. 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. GEOFFREY COUSINS: They do. I agree, it's a moral tale, and a wonderfully told one. I can't say enough about it. I cried in this book, and I don't often do that, and if I do, I don't normally admit it.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. 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. Boswell, Evelyn (2006-10-05). "New Stegner professor to hit the ground running". Montana State University. Find sources: "Crossing to Safety"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( August 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

JASON STEGER: No, no. I think you're right. It's an extraordinary book. I like the way it's narrated. I liked... as you touched on, Larry, you know, he talks about writing, telling you this story, writing this sort of memoir/novel as he's going along. But in any, sort of, overt, post-mortem way. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Crossing to Safety is a 1987 semi-autobiographical novel by "The Dean of Western Writers", [1] Wallace Stegner. It gained broad literary acclaim and commercial popularity. JENNIFER BYRNE: It actually makes you... It sounds ridiculous, but it makes you feel like a better person having read it.

GEOFFREY COUSINS: But it's a bit like, to me, a sculptor who doesn't need layers of lights and what have you, who can take a piece of wood or marble, and just with a few chisels make something incredible, have an amazing image emerge from very simple materials. To me, that's what he does, and I find that more impressive than somebody who's flashing laser lights all over the room.

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. Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope. 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 » 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.

JENNIFER BYRNE: It's worth mentioning he was 78. This was Wallace Stegner's last book. So it's like a bulletin at the end of a long life. Geoffrey, how did you respond to it?