40 pages • 1 hour read
Wallace StegnerCrossing to Safety
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 1, Chapters 12-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary
Chapter 12 details an idyllic life spent at the country home in the Northeast. For Larry, the days have a refreshing regularity:
I found the days as Sally had described them. We did our hours of constructive work, all of us, from eight to eleven-thirty: Sid in his study, Sally and Charity with their babies and house plans and shopping and village volunteerism, I in the moving shade of the treetops on the guest-house porch, the cook in her kitchen, the nurse girl in the nursery, and God, presumably, in his Heaven (153).
Swimming, tennis, and general relaxation occupy their days. At dinner, prominent guests visit, and there is vigorous and serious talk. Later, Sally and Larry are introduced to the family. Larry’s professional troubles are on his mind for these introductions, yet he is proud of his nascent literary life of working on his next book: “Perhaps also, in some small way, I was Cinderella to them, as I was to myself. No matter how cold the ashes or grubby the household chores, I lived by the faith that when the time came, the glass slipper would fit my little foot, and that when I needed her the fairy Godmother would pull up in her pumpkin coach” (157). It is here that he decides to make writing a career, even in the face of such great risk.
Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary
Chapter 13 describes a walking trip that Larry takes with the Langs. The uncertainty in their professional lives makes the trip unusually tense. Larry remarks on this tension in his recollections, yet is careful to avoid a literary-sounding cliché: “Since this story is about a friendship, drama expects friendship to be overturned. Something, the novelist in me whispers, is going to break up our cozy foursome” (163-64). He points to his own real, though misplaced, anxiety regarding Sid and Sally: “[W]hat more plausible than Sid Lang, a rampant male married to a somewhat malleable wife, should be tempted by Sally’s softer nature. I have already dropped a hint of that by recalling my uneasiness about their skinny-dipping” (164). However, what transpires on the trip is completely different than what Larry expects. The Langs offer a place for Sally and Larry to stay while Larry is writing his next novel. With this good news however, comes an emergency: Sally becomes mysteriously weak and faint, an illness revealed to be polio. The coincidence of the two is not lost on Larry: “Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right” (195).
Part 1, Chapters 12-13 Analysis
The end of Part 1 features several large events that occur suddenly amidst smaller, less significant events. When Sally leaves for a brief trip to recuperate in Vermont, Larry projects his own anxiety and loneliness onto her and has great difficulty sustaining his own work on his own. In Chapter 12, he and Sally are the guests of the Langs, a moment which represents the first time Larry can experience family, having lost his own. Amidst this feeling of support and acceptance is where Larry summons the courage to make the leap to write fiction full-time, albeit with little consultation from Sally. The chapter ends on an uncertain note, with the problems in the marriage masked by this newfound resolution. Sally’s polio, hinted at throughout the early sections of the novel, is a sudden blow to Larry’s belief in his ability to order and master his life, the “dream of man” (195), as he calls it. However, in a pattern characteristic to the novel, this kind of high anxiety, even panic for Larry, renders these moments inaccessible. Only in later chapters will the reader learn exactly what has transpired in these difficult and challenging moments. However, this absence of recollection nevertheless has important significance for how Larry will construct his own life alongside that of his closest friends.
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By Wallace Stegner
