Thursday, June 17, 2010

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Stegner's language is just beautiful. In "Crossing" when Larry Morgan says of his wife, "Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view of earth," it just makes you stop for a second and appreciate this amazing writer.

Larry and Sally Morgan, an English college professor and housewife, respectively, are newly married and newly arrived at a university in Wisconsin when they meet the force that is Sid and Charity Lang, he a professor as well. They are completely captivated with the Langs. More from Stegner: "We straggled into Madison, Wisconsin, western orphans and the Langs adopted us into their numerous, rich, powerful, reassuring tribe. We wandered into their orderly Newtonian universe, a couple of asteroids, and they captured us with their gravitational pull and made moons of us and fixed us in orbit around themselves."

Through the years the 2 couples become deeply involved in each other's lives, from the Lang's beloved home and 'camp' in Vermont to a year in Florence together to the very end and everywhere in between, their friendship survived heartbreak and tragedy.

Stegner isn't everyones cup of tea but I just revel in his use of words and his characters.

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