Crossing to Safety
By Wallace Stegner
Random House, 277 pages, $18.95
There comes a time in the career of any intelligent novelist when the enterprise seems constrained and unreal.
Indeed, it can be argued that intelligence, beyond a modest minimum, is an impediment to novel writing, a burden that only makes it difficult to keep going.
Many of our eminent novelists-Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway come immediately to mind-were not all that bright. For the clever writer, however, for the thoughtful self-aware practitioner, there can be an increasing difficulty to which the response is some strategem of trickery.
Wallace Stegner`s career is long and illustrious. His new novel appears on the 50th anniversary of the publication of his first book (”Remembering Laughter”). He has won the Pulitzer Prize (for ”Angle of Repose”) and a National Book Award (for ”The Spectator Bird”).
Stegner is, moreover, an intelligent fellow, having for years headed the fine creative writing program at Stanford. It would be surprising, then, if there weren`t some signs of strain and, indeed, they are vivid.
Stegner offers to perform a most difficult feat-the representation of goodness, good people who are good friends through the course of many years. Nothing very dramatic happens. The worst moments are those in which one character is annoyed with another for his sheer orneriness. Or her bossiness. Then, just as we begin to lose patience or to take sides, there is a generous gesture, or a moment of empathy or intuitive understanding. Or simply a change in perspective. The shape of the book is one large flashback, the present action being the last reunion of the two couples in the Vermont summer home of one of them, a reunion that is actually the death watch for one of the women, who has cancer.
There is almost certainly a self-portrait in his paragraph about Larry, his writer-narrator, in Vermont, on a guest-house porch, ”where, with my typewriter on a card table, and the thrushes and whitethroats singing up the last act of the summer`s intense family life, I could sit among the treetops and look down through the hemlocks to the glitter of the lake and feel my mind as sharp as a knife, capable of anything, including greatness.”
If goodness rather than greatness is the result, both for Larry and for
”Crossing to Safety,” there is still occasion for celebration.
