Crossing to Safety

I'm re-reading Crossing to Safety, a book I first read at least ten years ago, and which I loved at the time (in the way I often love books--wholeheartedly, gushedly, and recommending them to everyone I meet).  I've found this reading a very different experience.  Although I'm still very much engaged by the story and find the writing, at times, very good, I have been incredibly off-put by the tone and narrative voice.

The book begins in the late 1930s, at the end of the Great Depression, where two couples meet in Madison, Wisconsin, where the men are interim professors at the university.  Their wives are both pregnant, and the couples become fast friends.  The novel focuses on their subsequent, lifelong friendship and jumps between the early days of their friendship and the present day when, aged grandparents, they reconvene on the Vermont summer compound where they had spent so much time.

It's a story of friendship that is gently, lovingly told.  There's a strange tic, however, to the point of view.  The narrator is the male half of one couple, devoted to his wife and yet strangely ambivalent to the child she gives birth to at the beginning of the novel.  He seems completely dissociated from the child, almost resentful, and certainly makes frequent reference to the times his wife was as she was before the child or could forget the existence of the child and be carefree.  It's bizarre.

But I suppose it fits with the way both couples live their lives.  The way the story is told, the children play very little part when their young--they're spirited away by their nanny, while the adults have late dinners and go skinny dipping at midnight or take week-long hiking trips.  I never would have picked up on this before having E., but it's glaringly obvious to me now.  I can't imagine raising a child that way, can't imagine giving birth to it but then relegating it to the background during its most formative years.

But then I wonder two things.  First, perhaps the story really is just a reflection of the male narrator.  Perhaps if the story were told from the perspective of one of the women, the children would play a much larger role.

Second, I suppose it could be observed that we are raising our child no differently.  However, instead of relegating her to a nanny while we go on fun outings with our friends, we leave her with someone else while we go to work and pursue our careers.

It feels different, though.  But maybe the distinction is merely semantic.