Heck Of A Guy

The Confession

After perusing a review of Stegner’s Crossing To Safety, I somehow got the idea that it had only recently been published. One can imagine my surprise (although why one would bother to divert precious mental resources from, say, a favorite superhero fantasy to wondering what pulls my startle trigger is beyond me) when I pulled up the appropriate Amazon.com page to discover batches of used volumes on sale at prices as low as a penny, a presumptive cyber-retail sign of a book popular enough and on the market long enough to have been sold in numbers sufficient for the law of supply and demand to kick in with a vengeance. The easily available publication date, of course, confirmed that Crossing To Safety had been available to the non-comatose portion of the book buying public for almost two decades.

Nor is this an obscure gem. A quick scan of its online reviews revealed that were one (perhaps one bored with pondering what surprises me) to draw a Venn diagram of the intersection of the set of folks with pretensions of being well-read and the set of individuals unfamiliar with Crossing To Safety, the resulting subset would consist exclusively of me and a 38 year old obsessive-compulsive taxi driver in Orlando, Florida who is psychologically locked into reading the corpus of contemporary American fiction in alphabetical order by the author’s last name and, as it turns out, isn’t scheduled to even start on any of Stegner’s works until September 21, 2011.

Yes, indeed, a book published to considerable acclaim in 1987 and described by readers as “life-changing,” “a masterpiece,” and “a once in a lifetime read,” not only failed to make it to my reading list but did not even enter my teeny-tiny sphere of awareness.

The Recommendation

I am genuinely grateful to have found this charming, bittersweet, and wise book however belatedly and feel obliged to recommend it on the statistically improbable chance that someone who is interested in books of this sort has remained likewise oblivious to this title. In addition to a moving narrative of the bonds and friction between four individuals and how each survives the inevitable fluctuations of their world, Crossing To Safety is embedded with all manner of unexpected gems, including a more than competent explication of Housman’s Easter Hymn.¹

For what it’s worth, the most personally impressive aspect of Crossing To Safety is the credibility of the characters and their capacity to engage me although I perceive few similarities between their lives and my own. Each of the four major players seems to me genuinely admirable although each is glaringly if not quite catastrophically flawed. And, the emotional connection between the two couples is rich, intriguing, painful, provocative, rewarding, humbling, and a whole bunch of other worthwhile qualities.

Actually, I am also grateful that I did not find this book earlier; even a few years ago, I would not have lived enough to grasp its richness and emotional density.

Footnotes

1. I have a thing for Housman’s poems — wanna make something of it?↩

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