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Reviews of James Salter's Novels

On ALL THAT IS:

This is the second novel by James Salter that I have read, and I love this one at least as much as I loved the first: Light Years. All That Is is an enchanting--and sometimes repellent--narrative centering on a veteran of World War II and thus on a member of The Great Generation. The story begins with his military experiences, and this section is extremely informative and well told.

What draws me to this writer again and again is how very well he writes. I am talking about his style at the level of the sentence and the paragraph. His choice of words and the rhythms of his sentences are so beautiful as to make it very difficult for me to keep any critical distance from what I am reading. His style is as elegant and ravishing as the beautiful women he describes in his narrative.

He is also a wonderful reporter of daily life in another era. When he talks about wines, or hotels, or houses I find myself envious of the characters who drink or sleep or live in them. He is particularly good with food and restaurants. He appreciates food as he seems to appreciate women.

Yet there is a uneasiness, a strangeness to the way he sees things and the stories he tells that keeps me off balance and leave me confused. For instance, his hero is very sympathetic, and I follow his life with interest and a certain affection. And yet, towards the end of the novel he does something totally despicable. He gives no reason for doing it, and his creator is silent on the issue. The apparent motive is pure revenge, but it is horribly misguided.

Perhaps this episode is like what provokes it, an unexplained and almost inexplicable act of cruelty and selfishness directed at the protagonist. This act exhibits itself so naked and without rationale as to position itself beyond fiction. It simply is not at home within the realm of art and must, therefore, be some raw piece of life dragged into the otherwise artful narrative.

The long biographical narrative comes to no real conclusion. There is the introduction of a final romance, but by this time I was already badly enough burned to wonder whether this would end up any more happily than its predecessors. Our hero is older and wiser, and I wish him well.

Once again, however, for me some characteristics of a great writer are beyond my powers of description. After my six decades of reading I find that I simply recognize great writing after only a few sentences. I suppose this is not very scientific as a mode of analysis, but frankly I am a bit beyond caring now, and deeply grateful to a writer like Salter who can write such beautiful books.

On LIGHT YEARS:

I have just started to read this book, but I was convinced of its excellence after I read the first page. There is a lucidity to the prose that reminds me of Fitzgerald at his best, and the sentences are rich and rhythmical in ways that are very hard to analyze or describe, and yet these qualities are easily apparent to the careful reader. I will report back when I have finished reading the book.

Now I have finished the book, and I take back nothing I said when I started it. The book is a beautiful thing. It made a deep impression on me, and I doubt that I will forget much of it. Although the prose is sometimes a bit overblown, and I found dozens of metaphors that didn't improve the transmission of the story, the prose has an elegance and limpidity that cannot be fully described. It's something about the rhythms of the sentences that held my attention and possessed my mind while I was reading.

The last part of the novel came as a great disappointment. Threads of narrative were begun and then simply abandoned or perfunctorily cut short. For example Viri's Italian lover appears, attracts our interest, and then disappears. Perhaps she leaves him. Nedra has asked Viri for money, and Lia urges him not to send it. Later we learn that Nedra "has money now" and she rents an old beach house. Are we supposed to infer that since she now has money that Viri has sent it to her? And that since he did that, then Lia left him? Maybe. But it is a very abrupt way to cut Lia out of the picture. Even if I forget the abruptness of it and see it as one more proof of Viri's devotion to Nedra, that just make me like the latter less.

Another thing that disappointed me was Salter's seeming celebration of Nedra at the end. Throughout the book she was consistently selfish (see what Catherine says in chapter II), and egotistical. She takes men on and discards them. She deserts her husband for no apparent reason and destroys his life. She is not even true to her pretensions. She starts a career as an actor, but that disappears, just vanishes, as suddenly as her lovers do.

Her love for her daughters is touching, but at the end she wants Franca to follow in her footsteps, something completely consistent with Nedra's extraordinary egotism.

At the end of the novel, however, Salter seems to lionize her. Here I thought he had been presenting her ironically. She dies supremely satisfied with herself, and the narrator gives no clue as to why we should not join in the celebration. She has not grown old. She is fresh still, almost like Dorian's portrait. She has accomplished nothing of note. She has hurt many people and pretty much destroyed the sympathetic Viri. And yet we have to watch go to her grave as a hero, a paragon, the exemplar of a person who has achieved real freedom. I found myself looking everywhere for some ironic undercutting or this--the kind of thing Updike does so subtly and so well--but my search came up empty.

From the beginning, I knew I was reading great writing, and I haven't changed my mind. The last chapters, however, seem to undermine the graceful architecture of the whole story. I simply don't understand how a writer so talented and experienced could wreck such havoc upon his own story.