Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Larry and Sally Morgan return after many years to the Vermont cabin where they once spent their happiest moments. Their old friend, Charity Lang, is dying, with her husband Sid at her side. Charity's impending death promises an end to a lifelong friendship between the foursome, fused at first in the crucible of the University of Wisconsin, where Larry and Sid were professors of literature. After losing their jobs in a flurry of firings during World War II, rich Sid's Vermont property was offered as a safe haven to the poorer Morgans. An idea of a life was constructed there, in which the Langs might act as patron to their friends, but the idyll proved to be short-lived, as Sally's sudden polio whisked them away. Now, as Charity is dying, it is an occasion for narrator Larry to look back on a beautiful friendship that never quite made as large a part in anyone's life as they would have liked.

I found the first half or so of Crossing to Safety terrifically boring. We are asked to believe that these two couples are amazed and awe-inspired by what they find in each other, but outside of a clear kind of sympathy, it was never independently clear to me that any of them was quite worth the hearts in the eyes or the dropped jaws or what have you. And the setting of the academy of the 1940's, when someone like Larry could receive a check equivalent to a quarter of his yearly salary for writing a single short story and mailing it off to the Atlantic, made the book feel sort of self-consciously "literary" in a way that people tend to make fun of. (Stoner, anyone?)

But I thought it became more interesting when the cracks started to show in the friends' relationship: we're told that Sid nurses a crush on Sally, for one. More than this, I was interested in the relationship between Sid and Charity: he sees himself as a poet but she pressures him into a narrow view of success, academic success, something at which he is manifestly less talented and less passionate about. Larry's brief success as a writer activates Sid's jealousy, and more than that, his resentment toward Charity. There's a great and telling scene where the friends go hiking and Charity is so slavishly devoted to the counsel in her guidebook that she nearly kills them with undercooked chicken. (When it says "three minutes on one side," everyone points out to the stubborn charity, it means hamburger, not poultry.) Charity even tries to die "by the book," sending Sid away at the last minute and "slipping away" (I guess this means suicide?) so that she might die cleanly, without burdening anyone. Of course, this isn't what Sid wants--he wants to be by his wife's side--but even at the end of their lives, the differences between the two seem intractable.

I don't think I'd recommend this one. It has some nice elements to it, but I found the whole thing a little tweedy and twee, and it often felt that the book was too insistent, and consequently not persuasive enough, about the power of the foursome's friendship.