BOOKS The Private Life

In one of the frequent, thoughtful asides to the reader Chat punctuate Crossing to Safety (Random House, $18.95), Wallace Stegner poses these questions:

“How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us what we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?”

If that sounds like a stinging denunciation of much contemporary fiction, a broadside fired by one of the grand old men of American literature, it is. This very autobiographical novel, his fifteenth, makes clear Stegner’s disdain for the kind of novel that often seems to epitomize current fiction. Stegner reminds us proudly that Crossing to Safety is an old-fashioned book about old-fashioned people. His characters have little in common with the inhabitants of dozens of novels that float into a reviewer’s office each month, blurbs blurting their praises: “Not since Lolita opened the door has the frontier of forbidden passion been explored so skillfully…” “… focuses on the café and cocaine society of today’s movie-makers from Beverly Hills to downtown Manhattan…” “…a terrifying and violent encounter between a bunch of late-adolescent layabouts and a murderous, drug-dealing biker.”

There are no hyperactive nymphets or drug-dealing bikers in Crossing to Safety, a paean to a fast-vanishing world in which personalities are more or less constant, reliable entities; in which human values like love and friendship matter supremely and characters have reasonably clear motives for their actions. Stegner has written a lyrical novel about the friendship, spanning forty years, of two couples who meet in Madison, Wisconsin, during the Depression. Larry and Sally Morgan are recently married, expecting a child, and penniless. Sid and Charity Lang are wealthy (his trust fund), well traveled, well connected to New England Brahmin families, and expecting a third child. All are in their twenties. Both Larry and Sid are teaching college English for a pittance, writing fiction and poetry on the side, and hoping to be kept on after their temporary appointments.

Drawn together by work and pregnancy, the four are soon inseparable, leading Larry Morgan to the first of many meditations on the friendship: “We were all at the beginning of something, the future unrolled ahead of us like a white road under the moon. [We were] so glad that all the trillion chances of the universe had brought us to the same town and the same university at the same time.” The couples brim with youthful confidence and energy; they have not yet knocked at doors that would not open. After Larry sells his first short story, he proposes a toast: “Let us be unignorable.” Charity seconds the motion: “Exactly. You have to take your life by the throat and shake it.”

Since the novel is told in flashbacks from the characters’ old age, we see at the outset that life has shaken the four friends as well. As the book opens, the Morgans have returned to the Langs’ idyllic lakeside estate, where their lives were knit together many summers before. Now, they are in their sixties. Larry is a successful writer with some commercial value and a string of prestigious awards, but Sid, who had seemed much more talented, is finishing up an undistinguished teaching career and still struggling with his muse, turning out tedious, derivative poetry. Sally, a victim of polio, has been walking in braces for decades. They have come to say goodbye to Charity, whose strong will sustains her in a losing battle against stomach cancer.

In a series of lengthy forays into the past, Larry Morgan reconstructs the many surprises of time and chance that have made up their lives. His theme is that of many a nihilistic modern: “Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.” Friendship and loyalty and good humor help to shelter us from nature, which knows nothing of these goods, and these shelters often prove fragile. But Stegner does not go the next step with so many of his modern peers and proclaim that since time and chance wreck our dreams, those dreams are therefore worthless, illusory things. There is no retrospective devaluing of the past. The characters do not judge their youthful joie de vivre to be false because it did not last forever.

The style and narrative technique of Crossing to Safety help make it an engrossing, rewarding read. The narrator-whose views closely parallel Stegner’s-stops often to give us a Chautauqua on the decline of manners, the loss of the work ethic, or the alleged barbarities of the modern novel. Several times he claims that he would do things differently if he were making up a story, but he insists that he is merely a secretary recording a friendship and is not free to mold and shape the material to give us sexy complications and neatly rounded endings. “Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction,” Morgan says. So, when war and illness separate the couples, there is simply a gap. We do not read lengthy correspondence between the friends or get third-hand news of Sid and Charity through convenient chance meetings with mutual acquaintances. However, that fidelity to the way it was sometimes leads Stegner astray. A lengthy episode in which the four friends, now middle-aged, spend a sabbatical year in Italy might stand on its own as a short story, but seems to have only a tenuous connection to this novel. If this travelogue was included merely because something similar happened to Stegner’s real-life models, that was a mistake; as I.B. Singer once put it, “In art, truth that is boring is not true.” But Stegner has put too much life and too much art into this novel for small distractions to harm it. The author is now in his late seventies; readers should hope that somewhere his young successors are honing their skills.



Critics are anything but objective creatures. About fifty pages into Joseph Mon-ninger’s Second Season (Atheneum, $19.95), I found myself rooting for this book. I wanted it to succeed, so I was giving Monninger the benefit of every doubtful passage, trying to telegraph encouragement to his characters like some desperate medic in a war movie: Hang on, hang on, you can make it…

Alas. Despite my efforts, the patient slipped away, succumbing to insufficient reader interest brought on by the author’s curious failure to decide which of his stories he really wants to tell: the story of Brennan McCalmont, a middle-aged sporting goods salesman fighting to recapture the glory days of his college football stardom; or the story of a family trying to cope with the impending death of Louie, Brennan’s eleven-year-old son, who has leukemia. Given these givens, Second Season opens with great promise, especially since Monninger is working in the genre of the suburban novel: his materials are block parties, trips to McDonald’s, “Star Trek” reruns, spider mites in the garden, senior proms-the quotidian round of work, love, and play that makes up most middle-class lives. As a reader and critic I tend to admire writers working in this vein because if serious literature is to remain even a minority taste, some writers must make suc-cessful art out of the way the masses of people live now. There is a place for the rootless young narcissists of Jay Mclnerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, but there must be a place for books like this one, too.

Sadly, even a reviewer’s bias can’t help Second Season, which is ruined by the author’s sheer meandering inability to focus. He seems not to know where his story is. Just as a family scene begins to yield some revelation about character, Monninger whisks us away to a boring sales convention and spends ten pages on soporific chats between golf buddies. We wonder whether the fact of Louie’s illness really strikes Brennan until the book nears its end. Perhaps we are to assume that Brennan is simply numbed by despair over Louie’s decline. But even numbness and emotional shellshock can-and must-be conveyed by a skillful writer. Readers can’t supply what a book lacks.

The return-to-glory plot is handled with similar inattention. Brennan answers an ad for a semipro football team, and we wonder if he can shake off the years and the flab, recapture grace and perfection on the field, A couple of the players show signs of coming to life, but as soon as we start to care for them or the games, the author fast-forwards to something else.

Second Season is doubly frustrating because, just as we’re ready to chuck it aside. Monninger comes out of his nap and hands us a moment or two of close, penetrating prose. When Brennan sends his older son off to Brown University, he knows he has launched the boy into territory he himself cannot enter. “He was paying for ideas, and ideas would lake his son away. What would he do the first time his son was condescending toward him? Perhaps it would be only a mispronunciation. . .Maybe they would serve the wrong wine at a meal. Maybe they would not serve wine at all. only beer, and Michael would use that to clout them with his knowledge, his wider world.”

Almost forty years ago the literary world was asking, apropos of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, whether genuine tragedy had vanished with the aristocratic past-or could the sorrows of ordinary working people be transmuted into tragic grandeur? Second Season poses the same question, but due to Monninger’s blurred focus, we can’t read the answer. We sense, fleetingly, Louie’s brave struggle. We catch glimpses of Brennan’s courage. Ultimately, however, it’s not enough.