There is drama in Wallace Stegner‘s Crossing to Safety, but it’s the drama of everyday life: career successes and disappointments; courtships and births and illnesses; a hiking trip gone awry. There’s little sex, or even suspense; because the novel is mostly flashback, we know most of what will happen to the protagonists from the get-go. Instead there are lyrical descriptions of nature and scholarly ruminations on poetry.

So why is a leisurely paced novel about the decades-long relationship between two academic couples so compelling? Paradoxically, it’s the book’s particularity that makes it so relatable. All the characters are drawn vividly, but the four main ones we come to know so intimately that it’s impossible to avoid becoming invested in their destinies. And their actions flow so organically from their choices that we soon find ourselves nodding at them: yes, isn’t that just like Charity, or Sid, or Sally or the narrator, the promising author Larry.

But when we nod it’s also in recognition, not only because the years following the Great Recession may not be so very different from the ones following the Great Depression, but also because character traits like generosity and stubbornness are as manifest today as they were in the previous century. We know people like these; we are people like these.

And in coming to know them we come to know ourselves a little better too. Stegner has come to be known as a western writer, but that does him a disservice; he is a universal writer.

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