Crow heart Book

Does it seem ironic that a book I've awarded a full pentad of stars is also the cause of great frustration? Not when I tell you that my problem has nothing to do with the novel itself, but rather in conjuring the right words to do it justice. You see every account I run through my head makes it sound more boring than it is. I guess I should just start by telling you it's about two couples who met during the Great Depression. Sid and Charity Lang live well on inherited wealth. Larry and Sally Morgan struggle in comparison, but have inviting prospects in the groves of academe. While Larry and Sid were junior colleagues in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin, their wives met at a mixer that led to the alliance. Despite the generally hard times, the two couples shared lots of laughs and slathered layers of glue on to their friendship. Hard knocks ensued and health became an issue, yet the ties stayed intact. But nothing much happened you'd call sensational. In fact, the dearth of drama was something that Larry himself hit upon early in his narration:
How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things 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 suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?
But would a failure by those measures be so bad? I'm lucky in that most of the people I spend time with are pretty fully evolved. (That includes GR friends, I say in the least unctuous tone possible.) Their deviations from the norm are more subtle, and all the more fascinating for how well I can imagine them playing out in my own outwardly conventional world. Stegner was a master observer of more nuanced traits. When he profiled characters (as was the case in about 90% of this book), depth was a foregone conclusion. Charity, with her outsized personality, was the natural ringleader. Larry was the most accomplished, and in his role as narrator, the closest to all-knowing. Sally had the oldest soul, the most empathy, and the biggest shoulders for a heavy load. Sid, the wealthy scion, turned out to be the most conflicted - a would-be poet and dreamer sometimes at odds with Charity's agenda and will.

I'm hardly a Stegner expert with this being only my second sampling (Angle of Repose being the first), but he strikes me as the wise litterateur who makes most other writers look bush-league in comparison. Every page has a reminder that his wording is superior, that his insights are better written and, for that matter, better conceived. Here are a few short examples to illustrate the writing and to hint at the thematic core.

Larry, having been dealt another blow:
Accept? I get tired of accepting. I'm tired of hearing the Lord shapes the back to the burden.
Tenure hopefuls sharing a bit of dark humor:
You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? Sure He's a good teacher, but what's He published?
I can't remember which character said this, but figure it might as well have been Stegner himself:
Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else -- pathway to the stars, maybe.
And another one that could have come directly from Stegner, maybe from a master class in writing:
Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting.
Speaking of writing classes, Stegner was evidently very good as a teacher. Students such as Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey and Raymond Carver speak to that. I always wonder, though, if Lesson #1 is to first become brilliant. In a way it doesn't matter, craftsmanship vs. innate intellect, since to me Stegner had both. And speaking of pin-setting, the closing scenes he built towards featured plenty of drama even if most of it was subcutaneous.

This was the last book Stegner wrote, published at the age of 78. It was paced well at 368 pages, but I'd have happily read more had he cared to stretch it into an epic. The span of history was wide, from their early days in Madison to their elder years at the Langs' summer home in Vermont. But most of the intervening decades were skipped. Maybe Stegner's time and energy for a longer book were running out. Besides, he likely said all he intended to say as it was. It made me think that part of the wisdom we gain as we age comes in recognizing what truly matters: the people around us and the ways we connect. This book was a great paean to mature realizations.