Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (review)

Reviews Crossing to Safety. By Wallace Stegner. (New York: Random House, 1987. 277 pages, $18.95.) Crossing to Safety is an excellent novel, one of Wallace Stegner’s three or four best. It’s easily as good as The Spectator Bird, which won a National Book Award, and only a notch or two below Angle of Repose, which won a Pulitzer. If, at seventy-eight, Stegner does not have another big book in him, Crossing to Safety will become a fitting culmination to his career. A popular line of criticism holds that Stegner is a throwback to the past, a realist of the last century, who succeeds without modern subjects and tech­ niques. Yet, in this latest novel, he has worked with an idea that quite clearly enjoys a recent vogue, art as a subject for art. The narrator/protagonist of the novel, Larry Morgan, is himself a novelist, who shares with us the composition of his stories. Seemingly, everything and everybody is grist for his mill, that is until he contemplates writing about his closest friends, Sid and Charity Lang. Then, Morgan runs into a wall, asking himself: “How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?” This question lies at the very core of the novel, for despite his doubt, Morgan does indeed turn “quiet lives” into absorbing fiction. But the irony is that he unwittingly bases the “quiet” chapters on himself, not on the Langs. Without quite realizing what he does, Morgan attributes his strength of char­ acter to his friends. The Langs have the hectic lives that fuel so much recent fiction. Beside them, the Morgans live deliberately, even gracefully. Particu­ larly in marriage are they remarkable, since Morgan cares for his wife through­ out her sufferings from polio. The scenes of his tending her, assisting her to a bed or to a bath, affirm the value of marriage in terms that seem to have all but vanished from modern fiction but that appear believable in Stegner’shands nonetheless. That Morgan sees his own “quiet” life in the Langs is a hallmark of Stegner’s fiction, for Morgan is another of Stegner’s untrustworthy protagon­ ists, the latest in an ongoing experiment of first-person narrative that began in the late 1960s. As a writer, Morgan can see deep into the lives of those he does not feel close to. But when he turns his attention to loved ones, or to himself, his vision fails. In this, Morgan resembles Joe Allston of All the Little Live Things and Lyman Ward of Angle of Repose. The difference is that Morgan has little of Allston’s or Ward’s self-destructive anger. It might even be fairly said that Morgan is one of Stegner’s few happy characters. In fact, not in 146 Western American Literature twenty-seven years, since Leonard McDonald of A Shooting Star, has Stegner created anyone who lives quite as successfully and contentedly as does Morgan. To balance his experiments with narration, Stegner has again chosen gardens as his setting. In overly-tended gardens, he carries forward a theme that he’s much concerned with, the abuse of land. As have other characters before her, Charity Lang vainly sets out to secure her happiness by dominating land. She always tries, “in defiance of the genius of the country” (228), to “bulldoze” land to her purposes (265). But, as reward for her work, she only discovers “the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man” (267). Stegner’s success with this latest work lies in the ability to use contempor­ ary art to express ageless truths about the human heart and about the earth. This novel is at once a fresh beginning and a comforting benediction. It’s Stegner at his best. RUSSELL BURROWS Utah State University Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages. By Lynda Hart. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. 157 pages, $29.95.) Lynda Hart’s Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages is one of the series Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies being brought out by the Green­ wood Press under the general editorship of Joseph Donohue. In this volume...