Enduring Bonds: Another Fine Read

 

My last blog on Renee Simpson’s I Can’t Swim, talked about the mastery of creating characters who are flawed, lovable and deeply authentic. Wallace Stegner, renowned author of the West explores the mysteries of love and endurance in this, the last novel of his award winning career.

Stegner: Crossing to Safety

 

“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.”

 

Thus opens the novel as Larry Morgan wakes in the Vermont retreat where he and his wife, Sally, have come to reunite Charity and Sid Lang, a couple they met in graduate school. The novel traces the endurance of the love between man and wife and the bond between the couples from the day the poverty stricken couple from the West meet the Harvard elite Charity and her poet husband, Sid, in the Midwest university cocktail party.

 

The union between the ambitious Charity who knows the key to success in academia and the gloomy pessimist, Sid, looks the most unlikely to endure, but it does, largely because failure isn’t in Charity’s lexicon. Though it would be easy to cast the over-bearing Charity as antagonist, she is not. Her generosity is as unstinting as her drive, and she is, at several key points, key to the survival and success of Larry and Sally.

 

Through the years, while Larry becomes a successful author, Sally is crippled by polio, and Charity props up Sid’s failing academic career. Much of the story plumbs the depth of the characters to understand how love and friendship can survive situations so rife with potential conflict. It is, at the same time, a story of Eastern ambition and money meets dirt poor but free ranging West, a theme Stegner has explored before.

 

Stegner is in no hurry. As the opening line suggests, he takes time to probe and consider, and at a time (1987) readers settled back to share the journey. It is due to Stegner’s mastery that we arrive back at the Vermont retreat—and Charity’s death bed—still puzzled and amazed at the power and endurance of love. Readers today should find this a refreshing change to the hectic pace demanded of today’s novels.

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