An unusual novel about compromise and friendship. It’s about a pair of married couples who become friends in their twenties, and follows their relationships across their lives
It’s about the fact that some people live their best lives, and some people don’t. It’s also about the subtler point that it is hard to know which category you fall in.
The husband in one couple becomes an author. The husband in the other couple would like to, but ends up a university lecturer. This is in part because his wife, who has far more energy and ambition than he does, is convinced he should do this ‘first’ before he tries the uncertain life of a poet. Seems reasonable. However he failures to get tenure, which sends his wife into a breakdown. I mean on the one hand one has to agree with the character who tells her to ‘renounce this dramatization of failure,’ but my other suggestion would be HOW ABOUT SOCIETY JUST LETS HER GET HER OWN JOB. Honestly, can you imagine how messed up things were in the early twentieth century when half the population had to try and live out the suppressed dreams of the other half?
This whole question of ‘failure’ is an interesting one. Here is the author husband:
Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.
This is my third novel of Stegner’s, and I am inspired to keep going. He is a lovely writer. Enjoy this description of a hillside:
The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other side of hills.
I wonder how long it took him to come up with that.