Crossing to Safety

What were your thoughts about the book? Which parts were most meaningful to you?

What does the title mean in relation to the book? Who crosses to safety? What does “safety” mean? How does the novel relate to the lines from Robert Frost that serve as epigraph?

What is the basis of the friendship between the two couples? What keeps them bound together for so many years? Are the two couples equals, and do their differences help or hurt the relationship? It’s almost like two parallel couples in a Shakespeare play.

What does the book teach us about friendship? “Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?”

What role does nature play in the novel? How does the stability of nature contrast the dynamics of the human characters?

Charity’s confident control is both a strength and a weakness. The tea packing scene, the injured man scene, and the final scenes of the book all show the dark side of her determination. Is her character then a tragic one? Does she grow wiser as she grows older?

What does Stegner suggest in the novel about the role of writers? Is Larry telling the truth when he says that writers “don’t understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer.”?

Why structure the novel in flashbacks instead of telling the story chronologically? What do the repeated returns to the novel’s present doe for our experience of the story? Perhaps relates to circular nature of the story: “In fact, if you could forget mortality, and that used to be easier here [at Battell Pond] than in most places, you could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving.”

What makes an interesting life? Is it just in skillful storytelling that a life becomes fascinating? “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 speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?

What does the book suggest about the balance between planning your life and accepting what happens? How do Charity and Sally embody these two extremes? “You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”