What Crossing to Safety Teaches Us About Connection and Vulnerability

Several years ago, I read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose and, like all great works of fiction, it has taken up residence in my head. My latest read, Crossing to Safety, is Stegner’s final novel, and while I don’t think it had an equal impact, it touched on some provocative issues and will also probably travel with me in some capacity. Stegner’s fiction is worth reading if only by virtue of how completely he creates a world for the reader; his capacities for description and pacing are unmatched. Nevertheless, psychological sophistication is not sacrificed on the altar of realism.

The novel traces the friendship of two couples who meet during the 1930s until the death of one member of the foursome nearly four decades later. It documents the highs and lows of their friendships against the background of personal successes and tragedies as well as major world events. In remarkable fashion, Stegner avoids the pull toward operatic drama. His restraint allows him to describe the friendship through the conscious lens of another member of the foursome, a participant-observer who insists on emphasizing the mutual benevolence in the relationship. Only rarely does he explicitly discuss the envy, competition, and even Schadenfreude that inevitably find their way into the relationship. As a big consumer of psychoanalytic scholarship, which often foregrounds the role of envy in unconscious processes, I found this to be a good corrective. Envy often simmers below the surface, even if it sometimes emerges unexpectedly in interpersonal interactions or becomes a big topic of conversation in the consulting room. In Crossing to Safety, it slowly percolates, ultimately bubbling up in such a way that it can be looked at and metabolized by the characters.

Without spoiling too much, I can say that this is a book that sees life as “survival, and the people you do it with.” It also deals with what to emphasize in the face of existential concerns, especially the rage that comes with them, and asks the question of how to preserve authentic goodness. This is not a cynical book, as the author believes that such a thing exists. On a personal level, this made me reflect on my own life and times—the many catastrophes and upheavals the world has experienced over the past decades and the friendships produced and destroyed by these events. It also resonated with the particular problems we face today, in which envy, comparison, and competition—magnified through the panopticon of social media and the epidemic of loneliness—make long friendships a very difficult undertaking. Moreover, it made me think about how much we all struggle to contextualize all this in the face of greater concerns about inevitable mortality.

At some points in the narrative, Stegner has his characters, academics, reflect on the nature of fiction, and the narrator-novelist discusses fiction as the work of getting characters into trouble and getting them back out of trouble. I think it’s also a good description of the psychoanalytic process—the process of crossing to the safety of termination is a way of answering questions about our core values and seeing what internal psychic structures are unshakeable, against the backdrop of change and experience. As in the novel, there is much frustration about what is left hanging or unresolved. Many problems remain unsolved, and if safety has been realized it is ultimately ambiguous. I think that is quite fitting for the final novel of a long, successful literary career. To read this novel is to emerge on the other side with a sense of something internalized, something to hold safely inside, and for that it is worth it.