Saturday, September 21, 2013

Crossing to Safety; Wallace Stegner; 1987

I've been having trouble figuring out what to write about this, but perhaps it would suffice to say that this is the finest novel intended for adults that I've read in a long time**.  So maybe I'll mostly just steal the author's words from a moment in the novel when the author goes all meta on us.

It's a quiet novel about the long term friendship between two couples, and is entirely lacking in "the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish [...] the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends [...] the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power [... the ...] speed, noise, ugliness, everything," in fact, "that novelists seize upon and readers expect."  

In short, it has everything I want and none of the bull.


** I liked Behemoth (YA SFF) and Night (non-fiction) equally well this year, but they are very different works.

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