Four friends, two marriages

Of all the people I know, Sid Lang best understands that my marriage is as surely built on addiction and dependence as his is.

Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Novels about friendship are numerous, but how many of them deal with the friendships of married couples (especially without marital infidelity entering the plot)? Not many. So Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety (1987) stands out for that reason alone. Plus it's a terrific novel.

Larry and Sally Morgan meet Sid and Charity Lang soon after moving to Madison, Wisc., where Larry, our narrator, will teach literature at the university. Sid is another young member of the English department. The couples become instant friends.

The novel covers decades and the ups and downs of their respective careers and marriages. Larry is a compulsive worker and a talented writer whose success in publishing begins early. Sid, less talented and less driven, inherited great wealth, so academic success may be less important to him, yet he doesn't think so. More importantly, his wife doesn't think so.

The two wives may actually be the novel's key characters. Polio cripples Sally while she is still a young woman, and she bravely struggles to maintain a normal marriage and a normal friendship with Charity. As for Charity, she has a controlling personality that becomes more troublesome as the years pass. She insists on running everything, especially her husband's career. He longs to be a poet, while she demands he focus on serious academic writing to advance his career. Even at the end of the novel when she lies on her deathbed with advanced cancer, she manages to manipulate everyone so that she can die her way, whatever Sid or anyone else may think about it.

"She not only ran his life, she was his life," Stegner writes. In different ways, that is true of both couples. Addiction and dependence, to be sure. But the phrase "was his life" suggests a more important factor: love.