“Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I awake.”
Wallace Stegner lived until his mid-80s and published some autobiographical writing before he died. I have to imagine it’s great because a) I have never read anything from him that wasn’t great and b) this novel proves how strong his writing was at least until his late 70s.
This novel is primarily narrated by Larry Morgan, an oft-published novelist with a PhD in Literature. The novel begins in the present day (not our present day, but the novel’s, about 1970 or so) with our narrator talking preparing for a trip and a reunion of sorts. He tells us that his wife is disabled and walks with the assistance of two crutches, but the details are not flowing here. Soon we move to the past, the mid to late 1930s where Larry meets his soon to be wife Sally. They fall in love, get married, and we’re finding them soon after their marriage moving to Madison Wisconsin where Larry has apparently snagged the last open posting for an English instructor in the nation. They spend too much of their only money on a hotel room and dinner before landing in Madison and finding a bad, but available apartment, where the first month’s rent is half their remaining funds.
But soon after arriving Larry comes home one day to find his wife and another faculty wife talking, and this little moment is the opening of the most important relationship of their lives outside of their marriage. Soon the two couples are inseparable. Larry and Sally; Sid and Charity. At the end of the year, when Larry’s position is unrenewed, Sid, who we learn is independently wealthy from his father’s business, offers Larry their home to stay on for the summer to write. Larry has recently published a novel, and this affords an opportunity. This deepens the bond, and they go from there. We sometimes jump into the present to learn that Larry and Sally are going to visit Sid and Charity, and that Charity is very ill. All are in their 60s now, and this portends to be something very grave and important. But we spend so much time in the past learning about their lives and their friendship that it’s hard to focus on the present.
Larry mentions at one point about why he never has published a novel about his friends (because he would have to write about himself), and he discusses how so much of their lives are just kind of regular and he lived it, so it’s hard to find those extraordinary moments within it. These are character born a little too early for WWI and a little too late for WWII, and so are squarely in the middle of the 20th century, without ever feeling like they contributed anything important, and Larry knows that what they contributed was important to them, but might be boring to everyone else. The novel, and I, of course, disagree. This is one of the most tender of novels I have ever read.