Light Years

by James Salter

This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness—and then felt compelled to destroy it.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, American, Contemporary

308 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

James Salter (1925 - 2015) was a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel (The Hunters, 1957) led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel A Sport and a Pastime (1967) was hailed by the New York Times as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.”

Reviews

[Cecily · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is no complete life. There are only fragments."

I loved this beautiful, understated, unsentimental, slowly tragic book. It’s elusive and impressionistic, but painfully real. A meandering suite of poetic tableaux. Disjointed yet intricately connected. Even the tenses are occasionally fluid. It’s imbued with light and autumn fruits, but a brittle chill lurks silently, hungrily, in the shadows.

“They are like fragments in which reflections live... collect them and a greater shape begins to form, the story of stories appears.”


“Their life is mysterious… From far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail.”

“Every plate and object, utensil, bowl, illustrated what did not exist; they were fragments born forward from the past, shards of a vanished whole.”

Fruitfulness - and not

“Children are our crop, our fields, our earth… They are errors renewed… Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; this is an idea we cannot accept.”

The house is home to children: beloved, but a limit on freedom, and a reminder that they will ascend as parents decline. They harvest the fruit of the garden and joyously bring it in.

“The seasons became her shelter, her raiment. She bent to them… she ripened.”
“She loved the autumn… Leaves fall like rain.”

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun...
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?”

From "To Autumn" by John Keats

But a painting of The Expulsion from Eden hangs in the dining room, and symbols of hardness, aridity, and expiration abound, especially feathers.

“On the counter was a glass bowl green as the sea, filled with bleached shells like scraps from the summer.”

Holding on or letting go?

“The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph… How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?”

If you’re torn between holding on and letting go, this is a book you should either read immediately, or avoid. If you opt for the former, I doubt it will give you answers, but you’ll see the complexity of your situation and know you are not alone.

“Is anybody out there?
Is anybody listening?…
If it's the end of the beginning…
It's everything you wanted, it's everything you don't
It's one door swinging open and one door swinging closed
Some prayers find an answer
Some prayers never know
We're holding on and letting go”

From "Holding On And Letting Go" by Ross Copperman:
Sung, on YouTube
Full lyrics

What’s it really about?

It’s a simple, chronological, story of marriage, the love of children, freedom, and the gaps between.

There is no sudden drama: just the gradual, amicable falling apart of a relationship and consequent bids for freedom and happiness.


“Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.” Rumi

It spans the late 1950s to the mid 1980s. Viri is a New York architect who lives with his wife Nedra and their daughters Franca and Danny in a nice house outside the city, near the Hudson river. They have literary and arty parties, friends, and lovers. The characters are intriguing and complex, and the writing poetic.

Quotes

Richard Ford’s introduction claims “James Salter writes American sentences better than anyone writing today” (1995). It’s hard to disagree. Light and water have particular poetic resonance.

Facades of life - quotes
• “There are really two kinds of life. There is… the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.”
• “We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.”
• “She was like a beautiful dinner left out overnight. She was sumptuous, but the guests were gone… a mare alone in the field, she was waiting for madness, grazing her life away.”
• “Her life had no foundation. She was only vaguely devoted to it.”
• “The age one longs to be, the age of accomplishments, of acceptance, the age we never achieve.”
• “Isn’t it better to be someone who follows her true life and is happy and generous than an embittered woman who is loyal?”
• “She formed her life day by day, taking as its materials the emptiness and panic as well as the rushes.”

Marriage - quotes
• “They lay in the dark like two victims. They had nothing to give one another, they were bound by a pure, inexplicable love.”
• “I love him… [but] it’s what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can’t do and what you must do.”
• “They slept as if there was an agreement between them; not so much as a foot ever touched. There was an agreement, it was marriage.”
• “The familiarity of it… like a tattoo.”
• “It’s like a burned photograph… Some portions of it are there. The main part is gone forever.”
• “Any two people when they separate, it’s like splitting a log. The pieces aren’t even. One of them contains the core… But it’s you who’s carried off the sacred part, You can live and be happy; he can’t.”
• “You have married me for my sake, but not for your own - not yet.”

Light, water, and seasons - quotes
• “The water lies broken, cracked from the wind... We dash the black river... We flash the wide river.”
• “The river is spilling light.”
• “In the morning, the light came in silence. The house slept. The air overhead, glittering, infinite, the moist earth beneath… The glasses held the stale aroma of vanished wine.”
• “The wind blew… ravishing the trees.. The vines stood erect in frenzy, shrieked and were pulled away.”
• “She drove through autumn sunlight… The trees were calm, sentient. The sky seemed endlessly deep, teeming with light.”
• “The day was like a river that began far off. Slowly, fed by streams and tributaries, it became wider, faster, until it arrived at last in a watershed where the noise and confusion of the crowd rose like a mist.”
• “The sunlight fell like cymbals through the flats of glass.”

Miscellaneous quotes
• “The city is a cathedral of possibilities; its scent is dreams.”
• “Lunch is not a meal; it’s a profession.”
• “Stories fill us like the sun.”
• “He reads to them, as if watering them.”
• “The newness of her drowned him… “The guilt of the inexperienced, like a false illness, bathed him.”
• "A house as rich as an aquarium, filled with the rhythm of sleep, limbs without strength, partly open mouths."
• “Alone in his sleep, the rooms cool, deserted winds from the Hudson washing him like a corpse.”
• “The radio stations faded; corrupted by static, they began to devour each other.”
• “A face coming apart from age like wet paper.”


More Salter

I loved this so much, I turned almost immediately to another Salter, A Sport and a Pastime, which I reviewed HERE. The language is similar, especially recurring reference to fragments, mirrors, light, and water, and occasional switches of tense, but the storytelling in that is different, darker, and explicitly untrustworthy.

[Dolors · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is nothing light about this book.
Paradoxically, not even the in the title.
I am blown away. I am devastated.
I wasn’t prepared for Salter, and in spite of knowing the plot and having read many of my GR friends’ reviews, I wasn’t ready to read this novel.
A book that looks the reader in the eye and questions everything we consider essential, the things we build our lives around, the grandiloquent words we use freely without really knowing the extent of their transient meanings: youth, marriage, love, happiness, parenthood, adultery, illness.
Be warned.
Underneath Salter’s diaphanous, luminous prose, the reader is going to find an answer that might be too terrifying to consider, the possibility that these big words mean nothing; that they might be a fleeting mirage, the shadow of a life that is more a performance for others than the real act of living one’s true desires or admitting one’s selfish agenda.

An idyllic house in the North of New York surrounded by the natural beauty of the Hudson river, a postcard reminscent of Turner’s oneiric landscapes, with a golden quality that captures that slow but insurmountable passage of time.
A young married couple with two daughters who seem to be the perfect match.
And the early hints of deep fractures beyond mending that threaten everything the Berlands take for granted.

Why read Salter’s portrait of a decaying marriage if we already know the end of the story, which has been exploited to death by countless other authors?
Because Salter’s fragmented introspection is nothing short of sublime; because his characters vibrate with the emotional confusion so relatable to everyday life, because his staccato style is poetic, profound and brimming over with breathtaking descriptions of places, moments and inner worlds, because his prose doesn’t suffocate the narration, which flows forward with kind grace and certain fatality.
Salter’s sentences are elegant and unhurried, and yet there is a cutting cruelty, a self-destructive force in the construction of this story.

I tuned the last page of this intense novel feeling that I had aged, but also that I had become wiser along with Salter’s characters. I suffered with them, I feIt impotent and angry with them, I know I could have been one of them. Maybe I am one of them.
I understood why it’s dangerous to confuse happiness with order and serenity, that one can’t appease passion with social conventions, that life is not fulfilled with interpretations, but with courage and energy, that contentment is not the harmonious watercolor we paint every now and then in our minds, it’s the ability to feel at ease with oneself and the decisions we are forced to make on the way.
Every choice implies the death of alternative realities, and at the end of the day, all we have left is the inner force that allows us to carry our losses and life scars with self-respect and dignity. Salter’s characters achieve both using different, even diverging roads; but the final result is sadly the same.

Salter’s vision of life might be gloomy, but sometimes we need that hopeless perspective to imagine whatever is lacking in our lives so that there is silent meaning instead of empty words in our stories.
My soul, enlargened by a book.
What to do with it now? And how to put it back into its normal size? I am afraid it has grown so big that it might feel empty from now on, no matter how many books I try to fill it up with.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

LA VITA NASCOSTA


Il Tappan Zee Bridge congiungeva le due rive del fiume Hudson in uno dei punti più larghi, una quarantina di km a nord di Midtown. È qui che vivono Nedra e Viri (Vladimir), Franca e Danny (Diane): i Berland. Il ponte è stato demolito nel 2017 per essere rimpiazzato.

Quindici anni nella vita dei Berland.
Vivono in una grande casa in campagna lungo il fiume Hudson un po’ a nord di New York, che a quell’epoca (1958) era già stata soprannominata la Grande Mela, ma non ancora in modo tanto massiccio come avvenne negli anni Settanta, quando si conclude questa storia (1972).
Sono l’archetipo della famiglia: padre e madre con due figli (figlie). I nomi che Salter sceglie per i genitori sono invece tutto meno che archetipici: Viri lui (diminutivo di Vladimir, la sua famiglia è di origine russa), Nedra lei.
Hanno un cane, un pony, un coniglio, le galline, e il cielo è pieno di uccelli.
Lei, Nedra, è molto bella e seducente, sa vestirsi, ha gusto nell’arredo, nella cucina, sa gestire la casa, ama le due figlie che crescendo diventeranno belle come e più di lei.
Lui, Viri, è un architetto, ha gusto, intelligenza, meno narciso di lei, più insicuro probabilmente, ma sicuramente meno capriccioso.
La loro vita è l’immagine della perfetta felicità.


La spiaggia di Amagansett dove la famiglia Berland passa l’estate insieme a qualche amico caro come Arnaud.

Felicità troppo perfetta? Troppa felicità? Certo. Salter fa poco per nascondercelo: già dopo una trentina di pagine, l’altra vita, quella nascosta, comincia a emergere in trasparenza.
Lui ha un’amante, probabilmente la prima. È Kaya, la nuova assistente dello studio, poca fantasia, ma che farci, è una donna bellissima e di classe, raffinata ed elegante. In fondo lavora con architetti.
A questo punto si scopre che l’amico libanese è l’amante di Nedra, già da tempo, forse da sempre. Viri non lo sa, ma al momento opportuno, sembra esserne al corrente, quando anche il libanese viene lasciato indietro, e un nuovo amante appare nella vita di Nedra.


Zabar’s è un delicatessen, nell’Upper West Side (Broadway all’angolo con l’80th) che esiste tuttora e da ben prima del 1955. Gourmet come Nedra e Viri non possono che far spesa anche qui.

La solita storia? La coppia scoppia quando gli amanti prendono spazio.
La coppia scoppia quando l’innamoramento diventa amore, quando il sentimento da bollente si fa solido, pratico, confortevole.
La coppia scoppia quando non si sa rinunciare: in questo caso è lei che non vuole perdersi nulla della vita, ha paura d’invecchiare, arrivata a quarant’anni se ne va, vuole vivere e provare altro.
La coppia scoppia perché uno è poco, ma due sono troppi.
La coppia scoppia perché nel ventesimo secolo l’io, i sentimenti, e ancor più le emozioni, hanno preso spazio, campo, importanza.


Kees Van Dongen: Ritratto di Fernande Olivier (pseudonimo di Amélie Lang – Picasso la ritrasse almeno sessanta volte). A p.290 è scritto che la somiglianza con Nedra è sorprendente.

Salter insiste molto sull’aspetto fisico, sull’attrazione della pelle, sull’incontro sessuale, sull’erotismo, sulla seduzione dei corpi.
Lui la teneva occupata con il più grande piacere della terra. Perché facevano spesso l’amore: i due hanno sedici anni, e per lei è la prima volta, una grande scoperta, fatta con il suo primo grande amore.
Non si era mai sentito così euforico dopo l’amore. Ogni minima cosa aveva trovato la sua voce. Era un po’ come stare dietro le quinte durante una grande ouverture, da soli, nella penombra, e poter sentire ogni nota.
Questo invece è lui, Viri, dopo la prima volta a letto con Kaya, l’amante. Un’esperienza così intensa e forte che:
In qualche modo di colpo erano alla pari; il suo amore non dipendeva da lei soltanto, era più vasto, un amore per le donne, largamente frustrato, un amore irraggiungibile che per lui si concentrava in questa caparbia e misteriosa creatura, ma non solo in lei. Aveva diviso il suo strazio; c’era stata una spaccatura, infine.


La Russian Tea Room a Manhattan, luogo di incontri dei nostri personaggi.

Salter mette a fuoco l’anima dei suoi personaggi, è concentrato sui loro sentimenti, sui pensieri, sensazioni, emozioni: molto meno sulle azioni – il lavoro, per esempio, è poco determinante. La vita sociale e politica, la storia, tutto rimane dietro lo sfondo, non si percepisce.
E poi all’improvviso, dopo averci preparato, quando c’eravamo quasi dimenticati che sarebbe successo, quando forse anche il narratore s’era illuso che sarebbero rimasti uniti, una famiglia:
In autunno erano divorziati. Avrei voluto che le cose andassero diversamente. La limpidezza di quelle giornate autunnali lasciò il segno su entrambi. Per Nedra, fu come se le si fossero finalmente aperti gli occhi; vedeva tutto, era piena di una forza enorme e placida… Viri rimase nella casa. Ogni oggetto, anche quelli che erano stati di lei, e che lui non aveva mai toccato, sembrava condividere la sua perdita. D’un tratto si sentì separato dalla propria vita. Quella presenza, affettuosa o meno, che riempie il vuoto delle stanze, le rende più dolci, le illumina, quella presenza non c’era più... Si era aperto uno spazio fatale, come quello fra un transatlantico e la banchina, divenuto all’improvviso troppo grande per poter essere superato con un balzo; tutto è ancora presente, visibile, eppure non può più tornare in tuo possesso.


Ipotesi di casa Berland sul fiume Hudson arredata da Nedra.

È come se l’occhio di Salter volesse seguire in contemporanea tutte le situazioni e tutti gli intrecci, tutti i personaggi, lui lei e quegli altri, non perdere di vista nessuno, ma neppure smarrire traccia del tempo, ora, prima, dopo e molto prima, tutto insieme: per lo più basta un a capo, a volte anche un semplice segno d’interpunzione, per passare da questo a quella, da qui a laggiù, e da ora a c’era una volta.
Comunica impellenza, fretta di non perdere il filo quando salta e trascura gli articoli.
È un montaggio che ha sentore di cinema, ellittico come un film francese, il taglio è netto, ma non annunciato, non preparato, è poi all’interno della scena che si ritrova la fluidità e sensualità della sua scrittura, la limpidezza anche quando ci ha confuso le idee.
È un plot che riesce a essere una linea retta pur costruito a collage.


Ipotesi di uno dei tanti posti dove vengono consumati i lunch.

La sua scrittura…
Precisa, pulita, appassionata benché calma, sobria e sofisticata allo stesso tempo.
Nonostante Salter giudicasse il Grande Gatsby un romanzo sopravvalutato, la sua scrittura deve molto a quella di Fitzgerald, e credo sia proprio per questo che dalla prima pagina del suo primo libro che ho letto io mi sono sentito piacevolmente a mio agio, a casa, ben accolto.
Ci sono lunghi dialoghi che non cercano l’effetto, la frase pregnante, ma nell’insieme sono conversazioni che illuminano come le battute di una pièce classica.

Sin dall’inizio, qui e l’altra volta, mi ha colpito la luce che illumina pagine e situazioni raccontate, la sua temperatura. Sempre calda. E, in effetti, ci sono spesso caminetti, candele, il sole filtrato da tende bianche, la spiaggia e il mare.

Accade in un istante. È soltanto un’unica lunga giornata, un pomeriggio infinito, gli amici se ne vanno, noi restiamo sulla riva.


Forse è il caso di dire che galeotta fu la tomba: quella di Keats nel cimitero acattolico di Roma, nel romanzo chiamato erroneamente protestante. Errore che continuano a fare in molti, italiani in testa.

[Will Byrnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a portrait of marriage. I felt very touched by the lives he describes, not so much for their own travails, but in recognition of my own. There is such sadness in expectations unfulfilled. Our lives do not follow the script we write as inexperienced authors of our lives. We drift apart, do not, cannot travel like paired rails to a common destination. I guess that is what this book is about. I found it lyrical as well as sad, beautifully written, not the heroic in the world, the challenged macho man common to many other Salter works (Solo Faces, The Hunters come to mind)

P 24
There are really two kinds of life…the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, the other we long to see.

P 35
Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.

P 45
He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit that gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance. He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour, and in that hour, all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognize it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it.

P 300
Of them all, it [parental love] was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other, that sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one’s own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.

Other Salter books I have read (far too few)
-----1956 - The Hunters
-----1979 - Solo Faces

[Ilse · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant modern classic, subtly devastating and deceptively bleak beneath the luscious sentences.


(picture by Jerome Charaoui (Charaj))

Review in progress and hopefully ready when meeting with the book club in May.

[Violet wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

Light Years is a novel about a marriage and about home – home only sometimes the place where the heart is. Salter focuses on a couple who usually have a supporting role in other novels. The kind of restless, disaffected, showy, promiscuous couple who provide an inkling that there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. Except there’s no Hamlet in this novel, no Gatsby, no innocent who will be undone by the toxins of a culture in decline. Salter puts at the heart of his novel characters who are already fatally infected by the malaise. Viri, the husband, is a feckless sentimental dissatisfied husband. He is an architect but not, apparently, a very good one. Initially his most successful relationship is shown to be with his dog. He seems no less incapable of opening any door of his own accord than his dog. Nedra, his wife, is acquisitive, equally restless, vain and unfocused. They are both having affairs.

Initially I didn’t think I was going to warm to this novel. Early on there’s a lot of ivory tower writing, very self-conscious “beautiful” writing that rang a bit hollow, a lot of gilding over surfaces to make them glitter which had the effect of keeping the characters very aloof. But I began to realise maybe this was intentional, to show us the rather hollow nature of the stimulants enjoyed by Salter’s married couple. Everything they experience seems skin deep. The response to the sea or a sunset clichéd. As if they are programmed, alienated from the wellsprings of their individuality. It’s as if they are squandering energy waiting for something better to happen. The older the characters get however the more compelling they become, because, crucially, the more interesting Salter finds them. He suggests there’s something banal and cloning about youthful aspiration. As if only through disappointment do we discover who we are, what we’re made of. Salter was fifty when he wrote this and clearly being fifty interests him a good deal more than being thirty.

Salter performs a kind of autopsy on Viri and Nedra’s marriage. He depicts marriage as a melancholy affair, the imagination always straining to break beyond its confines. Both Viri and Nedra live a double life. Marriage doesn’t make them feel as special as they would like. Both are fatally alienated from their home life by this longing for something more. Salter, in fact, suggests home is the place where we hoard ourselves for imaginary future adventures without realising that the establishing of a home is the adventure, the ultimate goal, the centre of our being.

I loved the structure of the novel, its effortless fluidity. Rarely does any scene extend a page. It’s written in the form memories take, fragments of events, heavily seeped in atmosphere. I don’t however buy Richard Ford’s assertion in the introduction that Salter is the best current American sentence writer. For me DeLillo is in another league to Salter. And so too Toni Morrison. Salter’s prose is more anachronistically beautiful. Mostly he describes stuff that has been described a thousand times before. He does it well but he’s not adding anything new to our understanding of beauty. There’s little in this novel Scott Fitzgerald couldn’t have described. In fact he seems like he was writing at least fifty years before DeLillo or Bellow when they are not far off being contemporaries.

Also, there’s maybe a slight whiff of patriarchal condescension about the ending. A problem I had with the other salter novel I read. I've got a hunch Salter wasn't too keen on the women's liberation movement, picking up steam when he wrote this novel, and was a bit blind to Viri's woeful inadequacies as a husband. He was more interested in focusing on Nedra's restlessness but not very understanding of it. Blaming it on cultural changes rather than the fecklessness of her husband. I also thought it was a bit daft how he made moral judgements about Nedra's desire to buy nice things and put on a good show for dinner guests. That's human nature, not some indictment of falling moral priorities.

[Violeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Imaginative. Eloquent. Too stylized sometimes, absolutely transporting throughout.
Just like those magazines (yes…magazines) that appear early in the story and keep returning as props that punctuate the changes in the lives of the novel's characters.

It’s 1958 when it all begins and as early as page six “water-curled copies of Vogue” appear in “the principal bath, with its stains, sponges, soaps the color of tea, books, carpeting on the floor, a basket of smooth stones, an empty glass of the deepest blue.” The bath of the large, white-bricked Victorian house on the shore of the Hudson River where Viri Berland, the male lead, steams in peace, his little daughters waiting on the other side of the closed door for the storyteller in him to deliver. He is thirty.

Nedra, the “long-necked, graceful wife”, “dressed in her oat-colored sweater, slim as a pike, her long hair fastened” appears on the next page, in the kitchen, “stunning in her concentration.” She is dressed for the evening; people are coming for dinner. On page eight we find, among an array of house objects “glistening as evidence”… “magazines in which were photographs of women to whom she compared herself.” She is “a woman whose cool remark forms the mood of a dinner.” ���Her dreams still cling to her, adorn her” but she has also “accepted the limitations of her life.” She is (only) twenty-eight.

Objects, textures, sounds, light, weathers, nature, meals, all are meticulously described in this book. They are part of the rich scenery of this family’s life, a life brimming with friends, gatherings, outings, summer stays by the sea, culture, domesticity, everything “the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life” of the 20th century had to offer.

James Salter’s writing is incredibly visual. He follows the Berlands from the late 50s to the 70s in a series of cinematic vignettes, explicitly showcasing the “life people believe you are living”, all the while insinuating another life longed to be discovered. “It is this other which causes the trouble” - and propels the characters to whatever misery or conquest lies ahead.

The author zooms in tableaux that contain pleasures, agonies and people who make fleeting appearances not always serving the narrative; they become part of it for no apparent reason and then disappear, pretty much the way real life doesn’t follow the causality of fiction. But because this is fiction, he also zooms out and offers his narrator’s point of view in lyrical musings and aphorisms. The beauty of the words turns the reading experience into an aesthetic, as well as an intellectual one- even when you don’t quite agree with said point of view.

On page forty Nedra is in the city, “wrapped in herself, staring in the windows of bookstores at the beautiful heavy volumes of painters, the Italian edition of Vogue.” Why the Italian, when a bunch of local ones are readily available? In prose so carefully crafted nothing is coincidence or mere affectation. For all its abundance, this mid-century Eden leaves its inhabitants craving for more. Their possessions, their work and pastimes, the security of their haven are not enough. Something is missing, something is out of reach. Maybe it’s a matter of geography.

It's 1963, Christmas. “There was a treasure hunt, ice cream, lighting real candles on the tree, a huge tree standing near the window, thick as a bear’s coat, birds in its branches, silver balls, mirrors, angels, a tree with a wooden village nestled beneath it and a ten-pointed star bought at Bonnier’s on top. Nine magazines were placed on the floor, three in each row…”, props for a game of magic. House entertainment for family and friends. Their neighbor is there, a constant visitor, the kids love him. Nedra is sleeping with him. (Viri also sleeps with his secretary but she isn’t part of the domestic bliss.)

Five years later Nedra is flipping the pages of Vogue while waiting at a runway’s end “in a shimmering line of aircraft” for their own to take off. They’re going to Europe, to England, a lifelong dream finally realized. Maybe their marriage will be saved in a different scenery. In a secluded house in Kent “filled with pictures and prints… with gardens down to the sea… views of remote, ordered country” they observe their hosts, a couple that radiates the calmness of a well-arranged but passionless life. They are stunned by the image of “conjugal life in its purest form, problems held suspended, at peace within the regency of this pair”; Viri is overcome by “terror which cannot be confessed when one realizes one’s own life is nothing.” To Nedra the image is “proof that life demanded selfishness, isolation, and that even in another country, a woman utterly unknown to her could confide this so clearly.”

They stand together in a “leafy churchyard redolent with the dust of Englishmen” and have a vision “of what the years might bring: the too-familiar restaurant, a small apartment, empty evenings.” They cannot go back to their old life. They are in their 40s, but they feel and think like present day fifty-somethings. They did everything early, were married at 20, had children at 23, that was the way of their generation, of their time slot in history. A decade could be added by present day readers to make them more compatible with contemporary standards. Their disillusionment is recognizable regardless of day and age.

It's the 70s and the Berlands are no longer together. Their nuclear family has scattered, their house has been sold, the years are not illuminated by common lights. New characters have entered the picture, the fates of old ones are briefly mentioned; life has provided a wide range of scenarios, most of them bitter even for those with the best intentions. Once more the focus is on Viri, on Nedra. “She has made the pilgrimage through vanity, the pages of magazines, through envy itself to a vaster, more tranquil world. Like a traveler, there was much she could tell, there was much that could never be told.” She manages to tell her daughter the one sentence her ex-husband had always longed to give his children as his sole piece of advice: “You must go further than I did. With your life. You must become free.”

It was not a matter of living alone, though in her own case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.

In the end, we realize that the story of the Berlands is not as extraordinary as the illustration created by James Salter’s luminous language and imagery. Those magazines he keeps using were doing the same: sumptuous editions, their pages brimming with the best photography and literature, hordes of objects and suggestions of glorious lives, glimpses of artificial perfection, unattainable beauty. Illusions not entirely pointless if they manage to light up the blandness of everyday life, even for the little while it takes to leaf through them.

Of course, magazines do not provide answers, they use beauty first and foremost to sell the goods advertised in their pages. Salter’s literature uses beauty to “renew, console, transform – by a word, a sentence, a rhythm – all the surrounding tragedy of life into pleasure we find nowhere but in literature’s domain”, as Richard Ford notes in the introduction. This book is not a moral statement or critique of a way of life; the occasional acerbic remark from the narrator doesn’t conceal the affection he feels for his characters. There’s genuine appreciation for all that refines the texture of everyday life and genuine sorrow that triviality seems to be prevailing at the end of the day.

The breathtaking photo on the cover of the March 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar (did Nedra flick through it?) is particularly relevant:



A model dressed in elegant, light-as-air chiffon floats high above New York’s Hudson River in a plastic bubble. Free or trapped? The bubble is suspended from a crane by a steel cable, any evidence of which has been retouched from the photograph, same as the practical details of the life described in the novel are left out of it. For all their cosmopolitanism, the characters seem to be oblivious to events beyond their ‘bubble’, but overly sensitive to their own feelings and predicaments. The author, same as this cover, asks us to let down our guard, get carried away by the sensations of their fictitious world. For those readers willing to do so, Light Years promises immense reading pleasure. I’m glad I was one of them.

[Candi · Rating 2 out of 5]

“There are really two kinds of life. There is the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is the other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.”

This is the second novel in a row I’ve read that calls attention to the idea of deception. In this case, the deception is that of adultery. Salter paints a hazy almost dreamlike picture of a marriage and illustrates its disintegration. The problem is that I couldn’t get past the mesmeric, melodious prose to really feel what these characters were going through. I believe this could happen, yes, but I didn’t believe in them as real people existing in the world. They were of another more exquisite plane, albeit one where promiscuity is nearly romanticized.

“He was filled with secrets, deceptions that had made him whole.”

Going into this novel, which I highly anticipated, I had two things in mind. The first was the other Salter work I’ve read, A Sport and a Pastime, which I loved. I have no idea why that appealed to me so much compared to this one. Perhaps it was the point of view, the unreliable narrator. Or maybe it was the evocative setting. Or then again, timing may have been the charm. The second book I had in mind was Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. That novel took place slightly before this one and also depicted a marital dissolution. Yates’ couple, like Salter’s, also appears on the outside to be the epitome of marriage and the American dream. But what Yates accomplished, Salter failed to do for me. Yates sliced open and laid bare the viscera, the heart, of a marriage gone wrong. Salter pushed my head into a fog to gaze at his couple, Nedra and Viri. I couldn’t see them clearly. Yates’ Frank and April and their friends had some of the most compelling dialogue I’ve ever read. Nedra and Viri and their friends and lovers spoke to one another in a way that I can’t imagine as being wholly realistic. Light Years was also fragmentary, a series of memories and snapshots throughout two or three decades. Luckily, the prose elevated the story where the structure did not hold it together.

“There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.”

There were some fine passages about raising children. Something I could relate to. So if I took anything positive away from this it would be that. Oh, and the bit about the passing of time. That’s starting to become terrifyingly relatable too!

“He understands suddenly what love of a child is. It overwhelms him like the line from a song.”

“Life divides itself with scars like the rings contained within a tree. How close together the early ones seem, time compacts them, twenty years become indistinguishable, one from another.”

I had high expectations for this novel and feel a bit deflated after reading it. Nothing much was illuminated. Everything was at a distance. I’m an outlier sitting here alone on my deserted island. Someone throw me an incredible book, please!

“One of the last great realizations is that life will not be what you dreamed.”

“It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen.”

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is the other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

And here I am once more, mesmerized and hypnotized by the writing of another mid-last-century American male writer. A writer who tells about "the other" kind of life, the hidden one, with cutting, unsentimental strokes - each stroke confirming the doom of convention, of marriage, of life.

It's the story of Viri and Nedra, who on the surface seem to have it all: marriage, family, a comfortable home, culture, and a somewhat snooty social life involving many marvellous occasions, hosting parties with dear friends, warm atmosphere and delectable offerings (figs and cheese and ouzo always at hand).

This is only one level of life, though, a level that is only skin-deep. Underneath lies a great restlessness, mutual dissatisfaction, secrets, adultery. There's the fear of being alone continually wrestling with the desire to be free. There's the grief that comes with holding on but wanting to let go.

There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.

James Salter presents the story to us in fragments. It's like leafing through the photograph album belonging to this couple, and seeing through Salter's fine, sensitive prose, the progressing decay and damage between them. It's bleak, so bleak, but it's a work of art; you can't read a review of this book without seeing the word 'beautiful'. And it is. So beautiful. Poetic and sensual, Salter captures domesticity and all its comforts, as well as where it falls short.

The pace is leisurely and the plot is tragic. I'm not entirely sure the omniscient point of view that pops in and out entirely worked for me. Another quibble: I didn't understand why the characters in their 40s walk around like they are on the brink of death. Also, the last third of the book wasn't quite as powerful as what came before. If I had to compare this to A Sport and a Pastime I would say it comes in a close second. But, keep in mind I am comparing two melancholy masterpieces here - both books should continue to be read and adored, especially if you are willing to look at "the other" kind of life.

4.5 stars

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Salter was born in 1925.
He grew up in New York....attended West Point.
He was a career officer and Flight Pilot in the United States Air Force from 1945 to 1957.
He earned a living as a writer after he resigned from the military.
James Salter died last year, June 19, 2015, at the age 90

This book, "Light Years", is my first exposure to Salter. He won numerous literary awards.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford has been quoted as saying...
"It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American
sentences better than anybody writing today".

The rest of my review is going to be random thoughts
....I read this book slow.
....It's my opinion that the way in which a reader reflects on this novel could be influenced by age, marital status, and whether or not the reader has raised children.
....For PEOPLE WHOM ARE NOT FAMILIAR with James Salter: ( like I wasn't)...,
These are my thoughts:
1. If you are a writer and/or have interest in writing...this book is worthy of your time to read. (each word that Salter wrote seemed very carefully crafted...so that we are fixated into his special world).
2. If you've read Wallace Stegner books...( love them like me)...there is a pretty good chance you'll 'at least' be seduced by the writing style..( occasionally sensory overload for me), yet no question prose is lyrical and poetical
3. If you enjoy contemporary literature...about thoughts, emotions, relationships, aren't looking for thriller action..( can include the fact that you might not understand every 'thought' behind Salter's incomplete sentences), and the plot is incidental, .... Then by all means...read this book!

....Viri and Nedra live outside Manhattan, ( up the Hudson, out of the city), to raised their two daughters Franca and Danny.
....Living a polished cosmopolitan lifestyle of cocktail parties, holidays, chocolate and oranges for breakfast should one choose, gorgeous clothes, linens for the beds, best wines and cheeses from Zabar's market, shopping in the villages visiting the art galleries, ....Viri is an architect.
Nedra, "does everything and does nothing". She is tall, thin, sophisticated, and beautiful.

So....my 'real' thoughts about this novel:
I liked most of it...but not in a OH MY GOD sort of way. It's the type of story book that I would enjoy being part of a classroom discussion. We could pick it apart -page by page.
....I think feminist might have a field day with it...
.....There seems to be a real lack of freedom to be a plain Jane. Clothes, make-up, body weight, ( the wrappings of life), occupy the characters thoughts for so much of their lives...I really didn't think there was ever any sincere inner peace in this family. Not at the beginning -nor the end of their lives. Sure, they both took lovers...( no surprise). All their beauty, beaches, vacactions, wines, food, friends, could never be enough: THEY WERE NOT ENOUGH with themselves.
By the time it becomes clear to Viri and Nidra...that 'maybe' their young dreams were idealistic.... ( movie screen lives), they were already divorce..but also the book made middle age seem like OLD AGE ( I laughed a little that 43 & 47 was considered VERY OLD).... geeeee!

About the children: Franca and Danny. We watch them grow up to. ( their parents hopes and dreams). Nedra especially wanted her girls to be an extension of her self, and then do it better.
Well, even as a teenager, Franca begins to show her colors when she tells her mother, "you always insist on me being different". Franca didn't want to be her mother any longer. She wanted to 'blend' in with her peers. Sounds normal, right, mom's?

Later in the story...
When in Rome....
You'll see how everyone turns out....( I suppose every reader feels different about the ending). I'm not saying how I feel. ( I'm waiting to chat with my buddy)...lol

Overall:
James Salter takes us deep inside a marriage .. much truth is written in his word...
lots of detail descriptions ( many to love, some to shake your head at)...
I'm not sure why I wasn't 'shaken' by this troubled marriage though. I guess I feel their marriage was founded on friendship.
From the start, it felt like an arrangement- more than a passionate couple who each valued a monogamous marriage in the first place.
The REAL sadness for me...was 'less' about their marriage -(lovers-or even betrayal), The sadness I felt was their lack of freedom to BREATH & BE
Nobody took a stand for comfort living. Beauty was more important than rolling in the mud... climbing trees, playing in creeks...
They couldn't get their attention off themselves long enough to let go and enjoy life!

This was a thought-provoking novel with dozens and dozens beautiful sentences!
"We dash the black river, it's flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless ..."

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Salter has struck gold here with one of the most beautifully written book I will ever get to read, but this is not a story in the traditional sense, and some will struggle with Salter's writing, as this was probably written with older adults in mind and those with children, but should undisputedly be appreciated by all. Reflecting on moments in life, feelings for the change in ones family and the wide range of emotions this can bring and just simply the passing of time are the foundations for this novel.It's heart lies with the breakdown of marriage between Viri and Nedra an affluent couple who along with their two young daughters Franca and Danny make up a loving family and live what would appear to be a grand life, there is the big house by the river where they host many ravishing dinner parties full of fine wine, good food and lots of chatter with their intellectual friends and with trips to the city( that being New York) for shopping and evenings out things seems warm, rich and tranquil, but there is always a sense of melancholy that the life they have is not enough and they are still searching for happiness thus they start to fall apart as Nedra has a strong attraction to their male friends while Viri is transfixed with a girl from the city, they also feel somehow afraid of their future together and seeing their daughters grow up.

This book goes straight to the heart and doesn't let up with so many deeply moving, poignant and tender moments from seeing loved ones pass away to the transformation of their daughters from girls to young women to when Danny makes love for the first time there is nothing sexy or erotic about it it's just so honest and pure also when Nedra and viri think they have found love again it's like they don't know what to do with it, of the two I felt more for Viri as he seemed so lost and distant during a trip to Italy on his own and is a shadow of the confident man he used to be, as it spans many years and time moves quite rapidly you hardly even seem to notice as everything just flows beautifully from one moment to the next like a stream to a river and river to sea and by the end I felt in the realms of greatness. A heart rendering classic.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very beautifully written portrait of an adulterous marriage, adulterous on both sides. It's a novel essentially made up of vignettes, snapshots, defining moments. There's little dramatic tension but it's a tremendously wise and philosophical and poetical novel.

What I would say is that Salter is more convincing writing from the male perspective than the female. His heroine, Nedra, seemed a little idealised. As if we only see her through the besotted eyes of her husband. It's not entirely clear why he takes a lover. Salter appears more interested in effect than motive. Often what happens is quickly forgotten except as emotional baggage. There's a sideshow of friends and relations who flit intermittently through the book like ghosts. It's very true to life in its handling of outside influences - they come and go without much narrative drive. I suppose you could describe it as a novel of atmospheres rather than straightforward dramatic cause and effect. Standout feature is definitely the ravishing prose.
4+ stars.

[Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unfathomable Font of Blue Flowing: Life's Serial Goodbyes

This one hit home hard. I identified closely with the core of the male character, but I loved it most for its gorgeous profundity. The novel brims with such eloquence on both feeling life's emptiness of meaning and in appealing to life's abundance.

Salter does his damnedest (likely the best I've read) in beautifully depicting the depths of sadness that spring from life's fountain of serial goodbyes, in their many variations: from parents, from loves, from marriage, from children leaving the nest, from friends, from a time and a place and a family in years full of light, and, finally, from life.

he was "reaching that age, at the edge of it, when the world suddenly becomes more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain, the world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given."

[Marc Lamot · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What do we really know of all this?”
This Salter belongs to the genre of "stump in the stomach"-novels, because he mercilessly confronts you with the emptiness, the deficit, and the decay of life. It are feelings we all have in the course of our lives, and thus very recognizable. And the remarkable thing is that the author does not really do much to hand out the blow. His style is not spectacular at all, on the contrary, Salter usually writes in very short sentences, sometimes just a few words, purely descriptive and very undercooled. But behind those words is a world that is harsh, empty and horribly cruel.

The composition of the story is rather cinematographic: Salter offers short vignettes, a sequence of scenes with a rather meagre thread. The so-called "perfect couple" Viri and Nedra play the main role; at the start they are barely thirty, having two daughters and leading a busy social life. But life gnaws at them, they feel the emptiness that advances with aging, and especially the unfulfilled desire for more, for that other thing that they just don't seem to find, not even in adultery. Other characters are circling around them, and Salter occasionally puts them in the spotlight. Usually also the emptiness and frustration of what is unreachable is clouding their lifes. This repeatedly interrupted composition, accentuates the feeling of disorientation that the main characters also feel.

An incredible ’tristesse’ pervades this story, which inevitably has to end tragically. In this sense, this ‘Light Years’ is closely related to ‘Revolutionary Road’ by Richard Yates, which also deals with a marriage in dissolution and a pre-midlife crisis. But where Yates is more powerful in writing style (and in the end even more violent), Salter distinguishes himself by understatement, by a state of hypothermia that strengthens the fierceness of the struggle these small people go through.

To conclude a piece of Salter's evocative visual language. The fear of aging, deterioration and the end is described by one of the characters (barely 40) as: "the underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows law, the water rushes into darkness. The air is becoming vapor and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current starts to flow beneath great, impassable slabs "
Do you also feel the chills running down your spine? It should be forbidden to read this novel under 40, because everyone is entitled to hope and dreams; it would be a shame to curb them too soon.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel to read quickly, in a few long gulps. Reopening it each time, I needed at least 20 pages to recover the book’s subtle groove. Snatching a chapter here or a few pages there didn’t work: the characters sounded trivial, their pillow talk and dinner chatter banal, infuriating. I had to let their days accumulate. And the writing can seem all-too hushed and solemn; but the imagery becomes inevitable, the rhythms right. I admire Salter for having the artistry to write a novel requiring such immersion. Like Lolita, it's a novel invisible—or worse, annoying—if looked at from the wrong angle. Nabokov’s novel is just the dirty book of popular fame unless one surrenders, at least initially, to Humbert’s charm, and lives in his voice long enough to notice Dolores Haze trembling and sobbing in the omissions and elisions. Without patience, and an ear for the noise of its time, one might mistake Light Years for dated chi-chi, back number “lifestyle porn,” a precious exercise. A commenter on a clip of Salter's Charlie Rose interview said of Light Years that he’d never read a novel that so earned its final image. Exactly; it's all about cumulativeness. Salter’s first novel The Hunters also ends with an image that unites everything, a “boats against the current” kind of crystal. I understand now why some people worship this guy.

[Bradley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried to like it, I really tried. Had to read it for a class, and while there were enjoyable moments, it was for the most part incredibly boring. Someone else reviewing it called it old white guy fiction and that is exactly what it is. And there is entertaining and good old white guy fiction, but Light Years is not even that. I not only didn't like either of the main characters, I actively hated them. They were selfish, self-centered, altogether terrible people who didn't have any real problems but still whined about the ones they did have, most of which (the problems) came about because of their own doing. I often felt confused about where the novel was going (in part because it moves so slowly because Salter must spend three pages describing a street and only half of one describing a character and their thought process) and had no idea why any of the characters were doing most of what they did. Every character is a pretentious rich asshole who desperately wants to be famous like the composers and authors and playwrights they either look up to or want to look smart by mentioning/talking about. And their depression comes about because they're unhappy about being an ordinary person in an ordinary marriage with an ordinary person who they perceive to be holding them back. Don't get me wrong, I understand the novel's themes and to a certain extent what it was about, but that doesn't change the fact that it is still incredibly boring, and it's easy enough to talk about those themes and still write an interesting novel. And it's not a requirement that there be likable characters, but I don't find myself wanting to read a book as often if there isn't one, and there isn't one here. If a character is a terrible person, I can at least care if they're at least interestingly terrible, but these characters were mostly just whiny.

Don't even get me started on the dialogue and Salter's writing. If I never read another phrase about some famous composer's famous bombshell mistress again, I'll die happy. And someone please tell James Salter to go easy on the similes. Near the end of the book, he would write three sentences in a paragraph that would simply be "She was like a fire hydrant that's run out of water. She was like a house that no one's lived in for years. She was a tiger that's run out of breath." Even if the similes hadn't been terrible in the first place, his overuse of them made me want to throw the book across the room. My professor said it's been called the "greatest book ever written about a marriage" and I just don't understand it. There was hardly anything about the marriage anyway, and frankly, I wouldn't have even suspected these characters were married to each other if Salter hadn't actually said so. There was no emotion between them at all, and there was hardly any emotion to speak of, period. I was bored out of my mind the whole time while I was reading the book, and I'm still waiting for the point in the novel where I'm supposed to care. I can care about rich white guys' problems if the novel is at least interesting, if it makes me want to read more. But the main characters here are all shallow, clueless, selfish people who blame everyone but themselves for their unhappiness.

I honestly didn't hate the book that much, so I don't know where all this is coming from. But I liked nearly every other book in the course a whole lot and this one stood out from the others, not just because I didn't like it, but because it was also so different. I was kind of shocked to see the high rating it has here, because the rest of my class seemed to share my feelings about the book. To each their own, I guess.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this more than I've loved any novel in a very long time, but please don't interpret that as a recommendation because you might really hate it. It spans something like fifteen years of a marriage and is mostly about sexy people with tons of money enjoying elaborately prepared meals and traveling around under various types of sky. But it's great.

I've noticed that many people have no tolerance for novels about unendearing rich characters doing nothing -- or perhaps more accurately, not super-rich characters, but a certain level of privileged bourgeois. While to some extent I definitely get this, I think there's a perhaps unfair exemption for books written before, oh say, 1930. Because before that point, weren't most books written about rich(ish) people lying around doing nothing, and does that seem to bother so many readers? I'd argue no, and if this irritable standard were extended back a lot of you would miss out on the best books. Light Years reminded me a lot of To the Lighthouse for many reasons, not least because I felt like if they hadn't been separated by half a century and an ocean, this family would've hung around having a lot of lushly described, unhurried lunches with the Ramsays. So I guess I'm suggesting that if you don't mind Woolf's characters, maybe try to suspend judgment on Salter's and give them a shot?

Light Years was one of those books with language that bleeds off the page and seeps into your entire life so that when you put it down and go off to do things it's as if you're living inside its world. This is some of the greatest prose that I've ever read in my life. While I felt the last fifty pages weren't nearly as good as everything that had come before -- they felt rough by comparison, not entirely edited, and dead in a way that the rest of the book lived -- it's still one of the best books I've read in a long time. Again, this isn't exactly a recommendation because I can see how a lot of my favorite people would complain that this novel is unreadably pretentious and dull, but I personally loved it so much I might start over soon and read it again.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The only thing I'm afraid of are the words 'ordinary life.'"

This novel, first published in 1975, has somehow drifted onto my radar lately and I'm not sure why. I bought it on a whim and I almost never buy brand new books. I'm so glad I did. It is an incredibly thought provoking look at marriage, satisfaction with our lives as we age, etc. Although I'm not sure I will read in bed anymore. I had this on my bedside table for almost a month and almost quit reading it. It felt fragmented but I think that was just me, falling asleep too fast.

It can seem a bit piece-meal in the way it switches between narrators without warning or clear gap, and sometimes I would need to backtrack to figure out which characters were the focus. And not all the people who start out seeming like major characters end up that way, which was a bit confusing. Also sometimes I think people are having sex but maybe they are just on their knees for other reasons? Still there was something about working my way through these confusing moments that was deeply satisfying. I tend to read too quickly, to miss things, and every time I reset, I felt like I grew in understanding of the situation and people.

Then there is the writing, sometimes just so beautiful.

"Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.

And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see."

Passages like this are not frequent, in fact the novel is largely dialogue. But I appreciated these moments, reflecting on the truth underlying the scenes the characters play out with one another, not always the truth, not always what they are thinking.

How about this chilling conversation about America in 1975.. or is it less chilling, if people felt the same way then?

"Actually, we talk frequently about America. We even read your newspapers," he said. "I'm more or less obsessed with the idea of your country which has, after all, meant so much to the entire world. I find it very disturbing now to see what's happened. It's like the sun going out."

"You think America is dying?" Viri asked....

"A place and a history as vast as America cannot disappear, but it can become dark. And it seems to be slipping toward that. I mean, the utterly blind passions, the lack of moderation - these things are like a fever...."

I want to share what Viri thinks in the end, pg. 296, but feel like it would ruin the journey. Definitely a book to check out.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has left me shattered. It's quite an emotional journey: melancholy, poetic, ineluctable. Every sentence feels etched in stone, and yet the overall mood is somehow fluid, capturing lives in flux: the dissolution of a marriage, sure, but also the individual journeys of each family member, written in prose that is tender, knowing, and profound. The depictions of mid-century New York are also captivating and elegant and yet don't draw attention to themselves: they're more like a steady undercurrent that you know is always there, the growling engines of Chevrolets and the clink of Martini glasses and the crackle and pop of a vinyl record just before the music (I think of Miles Davis here) comes on.

[William Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

You ever have one of those days where you spend the waning daylight hours staring out of a picture window at nothing in particular, with a far away look on your face, trying to clear your mind with a scotch in one hand and the other hadn stuffed in your pocket, rocking back and forth on your heels every so often, shaking the glass to break up the ice and then sighing so heavily that you physically deflate, your shoulders slumping and posture slouching?

This book is the literary equivalent of this scene. It is spare and lovely and introspective and blank and somber and serious. There isn't much for a story here, if you're looking for something with a thick plot. This most definitely is not that book. But if you want poetry, if you want awkward encounters and conversations, melancholy, distracted interactions, and insight, then this is a book for you.

The only thing I can really say is that this is a gorgeous 300 pages of pure poetry.

[Dr. Cat in the Brain · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great novel doesn't judge its characters. It reveals them.

Light Years is a revelation.

It is a book of with slick humour, candid moments of life and insight, slices of wild sex and absurdity and one of the best character studies I've ever read.

It is a book that requires patience. Its punchy sentence structure is like Thomas Wolfe at his best. It will test your endurance. It is both succinct and theatrical, mirroring the themes of difficult reality clashing with dreamy expectations of life that run throughout the novel.

There are moments when you need to put Light Years down and think about it for awhile. Some books leave you with a lot to consider after 500 pages. Light Years leaves you contemplating with a single sentence. A single vivid description.

Like the best novels ever written it is both easy and heavy. When it hits just right it can both lift you up and weigh you down.

Light Years doesn't judge marriage, so much as it exposes the inherent human difficulty of relationships. How people need each other so much and yet clash with each other so easily. How relationships echo the superficiality of the life we dream of living versus the harsh complexity of the life we must live. And how these different lives entangle in marriage and can ultimately become embodied in our children.

Relationships are by their nature, consensual. So when we feel forced into it, or obliged to have one to meet some kind of societal appearance of 'normalcy' that's gonna be the core of a lot of unhappiness and resentment in our lives. AND IT IS.

But two people's inability to remain together doesn't mean a relationship isn't a good thing or even the best thing they can ever experience.

Light Years shows that the problem with relationships is that people see them within these short-sighted paradigms of 'success' and 'failure'. Where often what we accomplish in a relationship can be bigger and have a longer lasting impact then our own lifespans. In many ways having a relationship is realising your life is about more than just you.

Sometimes two knees touching under a table can change our world.

We are often made to see relationships as some black and white binary that either works or doesn't and this is a misunderstanding of the value of love. Or even just fun sex.

Understanding a partner can often mean that you realise why they're not right for you. And that can be a good relationship, even if it has to end. It doesn't mean you or your partner have failed, or that everything you had is meaningless or that you're bad people. In fact it can be quite the contrary. Relationships have more value then just domestic bliss or the appearance of a stable partnership.

That's why we can sometimes look back on lost love with a sense of nostalgia and appreciation for what we've learned. Holding on to something that's hurting both people isn't always healthy or a sign of an enduring love. It's often like holding onto a dream that has long since ended. Letting go can be vital to caring about other people. And maturing.

James Salter was a poet and a bit of a puck. His writing is inspired and flirtatious. His work was often accused of being mischievous even in his 80s. Some people saw that as a bad thing. I see it as a wonderful thing. His work was sexy, clever and above all obsessed with people. Not afraid of our imperfections but infatuated by them. Constantly wanting to explore them and draw them out.

Tease them into the light.

Not to judge, but to reveal.

ALSO: TORTOISE.
10/10

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere...

What a sensual examination of a languid marriage, a personal look at a relationship in tangles. A sexual exploration. Salter beguiles with poetic fragments which mirror the lives of his characters. The concentration of imagery made me forget everything else like setting and time. Even leisurely dinners have profound undertones, fragments have their way of saying a lot. Meanwhile, much of the story points to this sense of "hopeless domesticity," this feeling of being trapped.

She had accepted the limitations of her life. It was this anguish, this contentment which created her grace.

I couldn't help thinking of Nedra, even after I closed this book. She strikes me as a woman who should never have gotten married, should not have had children. A woman meant to traverse the world and find her meaning, live by her whims, explore in grandeur, build lasting friendships and entice others with her presence. After all, life is short, as the saying goes, and for Nedra this is indeed true. She reminds me of one of my favorite female characters: Countess Oleska from The Age of Innocence. And so it is that the themes of choice and regret come into play. For this seems to be an examination of self, as the two people at the center of this book are forced to look within, to see the core of their marriage, of their existence. It's an illustration of what happens after we've made our choices, of what could happen after.

Something was happening on every side of her existence, she began to see it in the streets, it was like the darkness, she was suddenly aware of it, when it comes, it comes everywhere.

Nedra is the woman who illuminates a dinner table or discussion. You sense her sophistication, her playful flirtations, her love of luxury. Yet she is unfulfilled, indecisive, unhappy. There is an uncertainty that controls her actions. Nedra's feeling of imprisonment leads to a few sexual explorations, some that even seem random (like the one after she's been denied an acting role) and seemed to lack tandem with the character's motivations (it made me wonder how a female writer would have written these scenes). One wonders how much of a role her husband, Viri, plays in this. Could Viri's seemingly lack of passion for ideas, for life, for his wife, have something to do with this and if so, how much of this did Nedra know before marrying him? James Salter wrote this as his own marriage failed. It is also said that he lost some friends when they learned that the book was possibly written about them; it is said that the husband was especially angry to learn how Viri (whom he thought was himself) was portrayed. This is one of those books that says a lot in a few words, compact and effulgent.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmm. I admired this more than I liked it. It's one of the most generic stories ever told, really, about the dissolution of the privileged lives of family and friends. Westchester County. The Hamptons. European travel. Educated, urbane conversation. Too much knowledge of good wine. Hot, intelligent children. "Luminous" prose, yea, but it seemed too often mannered for me. The syntax is consistent, two phrases separated by a comma, the second phrase deepening the resonance, often with an unexpected poetic turn, sometimes followed by a third phrase, usually a simile. The characters live on the page, nevertheless, but I didn't love them at all. Nor did I really dig the "light" motif. Non-white characters are vivacious lovers or stereotyped muggers. I've given it four stars out of respect for Salter, as well as the occasionally stop-and-reread-9-times-and-say-wow line. I realize I like his first-person more than his third-person narration. Had the same reaction with stories in "Last Night" -- his third-person stories felt false to me, over-mannered, but when he revs up and runs with a human voice, it all feels lived and alive.

[Ana WJ]

ThoTs on that Patreon, baby!!!

[Beth Bonini · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was growing up, in a medium-sized town in Texas, there was a family that everyone admired. They had three beautiful daughters, all of them smart, talented and lively, and one son - the youngest child, presumably longed for. The father was a doctor, the mother was a sort of mistress of the arts: she sang, acted, sculpted, sewed, cooked, entertained, and did it all of it notably well, and on a scale that seemed grand for our town. The family seemed to have more fun than other families; they seemed to have the trick of knowing how to live life well. This golden age lasted maybe twenty years; and then everything came unstuck. The father had an affair, and then another family, with a much younger women. His medical practice, and his reputation, never recovered. The mother was left the huge house just at the stage that all the children had begun to leave; once the scene of so much warm hospitality, the house began disintegrating, literally, became a white elephant that couldn’t be unloaded. The mother was given jobs, mostly jobs beneath her, mostly just as favours. She died in late middle age, of cancer. The father moved away, as did three of the four children.

I haven’t thought of this family in years, but this book - this luminously beautiful and tragic book - reminded me of the way I used to think of them and others like them. How often I’ve thought about how luck can run out in life; how even the lives that seem the most golden and graced can end in loneliness and even tragedy.

In his introduction to this American novel, published in 1974, author Richard Ford describes the novel as ”an anatomy of an American family with everything going for it, but whose occupants endure loss almost helplessly - one might say naturally.”

The novel covers approximately 20 years in the lives of Nedra and her husband Viri (Vladimir) and their children Franca and Danny. It describes their circle of intimate friends, their animals, their Victorian house on the Hudson river, their summers in Amagansett and perhaps two dozen meals. “Life is weather. Life is meals,” says the omniscient narrator, and I can think of few novels which describe weather, the seasons and meals in a more beautiful and sensual way. Does the narrator suggest that that is all life is, ultimately, a series of animal pleasures raised to a higher art (if one is lucky, if one has the gift and wealth for it)? I never could quite decide if the emphasis on the stuff of life is meant to be noble or pathetic; but whatever, it certainly cast a spell on me.

”Their life was two things: it was a life, more or less - at least it was the preparation for one - and it was an illustration of life for their children. They had never expressed this to one another, but they were agreed upon it, and these two versions were entwined somehow so that one being hidden, the other was revealed. They wanted their children, in those years, to have the impossible, not in the sense of the unachievable but in the sense of the pure.”

Both Viri and Nedra have this artistic sense that elevates the mundane. Viri is an architect - perhaps not ever achieving the greatness he had once dreamed of - but someone who draws beautifully and tells wonderful stories. Nedra has a gift for creating true beauty in her domestic arrangements and especially imaginative ‘tableux’ for holidays and birthday parties. For one particularly memorable childhood Christmas, Viri creates an amazingly detailed Advent calendar for the children. (The narrator also tell us that “he was late as usual; a week of December had already passed.”)

Salter utterly seduced me this description:
“They sat by the fire as Viri read. A Child’s Christmas in Wales, a sea of words that wet his mouth, an unending sea. They were rapt, they were dazed by the very sounds. His calm narrator’s voice flowed on. The dog’s head lay triangular, like a snake’s on his knee. The final sentence. In the silence that followed they dreamed, the wood dropping clots of white embers softly into the ashes, the cold at the windows, the house filled with brilliant surprises.

I found myself constantly jotting down lines and paragraphs: some of them philosophical, some of them striking and memorable for their pleasing arrangement of words. I found the writing transporting; the whole of it charmed me, even when its ‘message’ seems melancholy, even nihilistic. There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.

Perhaps Salter was thinking of Eliot’s The Waste Land when he wrote those lines: These fragments I have shored against my ruins. But with fragments as beautiful as these, as full of warmth and life, even if temporal, I was (at least) convinced that fragments are enough to make a life.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let me start by saying that this book is a gem, flawless, rich, intelligent, emotional, mature. It is a work of genius. Of a minor genius (in the grand sweep of things), perhaps; but of genius, nonetheless.

The Hunters is an excellent book - beautifully written, plotted, with rich and believable characters -- often handled deftly with a few quick strokes. In it, Salter shows that he is developing a craftsmanship of real note. And added to that is the fact that he actually has something to say.

I then turned to A Sport and a Pastime. And I must say that I was turned against this book from the outset by some very negative reviews from people I greatly admire. One of which, in particular, was wittily scathing. I ran through the first 30-40 pages at a tear... when I suddenly realized that this was a work of great artistry -- and that I should stop, go back, and read it without the arrogance of expectations. It is, in fact, a wonderful book. Each page, each line, a perfectly polished miniature..., something almost Hellenistic about it..., and of course, there is also the late modernism of its topic and 'feel'. The problem is that the craftsmanship is too good..., and it shows. One has the feel that one is reading a work of such conscious art that the deeper elements ultimately fail fully to emerge. Despite my rating, it is thus something short of a five-star book.

Light Years, by contrast, is a masterpiece. Here, the craftsmanship is entirely subsumed to the story, to such rich and remarkable characters, and to a poignancy of feeling that is quite remarkable. I think one has to have a sense of Salter to fully appreciate this book, and would recommend anyone interested reading all three, and in sequence.

But as to Light Years, I can't recommend this one highly enough.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could list quite a few little details in this book of things that are missing or that don't add up, things that might annoy me....... but none of them do! "How does she earn her living? How does she have money for that?" fleeted through my head on several occasions! They are just not all that important! She did somehow, and I am satisfied with that. I really, really liked the book! It moved me. At the end I had tears in my eyes.

Why is this? It is because the words create a mood, a feel of a time and a place that is 100% real. Genuine. This is how life is. Full of stupid mistakes and regrets, lost loves, searching and questions. Lost opportunities as well as good choices and wonderful memories.

The setting: NYC and Amagansett, South Hampton on Long Island. It starts in 1958 and moves forward up to the millennium. I knew even before we were told that this had to be NYC and the country outside. I lived there then, both in the city and further out. What is described is pitch-perfect. I recognized my childhood. Physically, by the houses and the pets, by the atmosphere of the place, by the hopes and dreams of the two central characters, i.e. the parents Nedra and Viri. Their choices are not my choices but that did not prevent me from relating to them.

You read this book for the lines. You read it for the mood that is created. You read it to think about your own life now that your children are grown. I think it speaks more to an older person than one that is still busy in the bustle of life.

I chuckled. I smiled. At the end my eyes were teary. I would not make some of the choices these characters made, but that never prevented me from relating to the book. Beautiful lines. Thoughtful prose, prose that gets you thinking. It is about how parents relate to their children, both when they are young and when they are old. It is about how you relate to your spouse and your own aging parents. It is about satisfying your own individual needs and how you balance those with others' needs. It is about freedom and independence. It is about friendships. It is about relationships. What do you do for yourself and what do you do for others? How do you balance the two? What is important in life? These are the things I was thinking about.

Superb, five star audiobook narration by Mark Boyett. Each intonation matched the situation and the person speaking. This is one of those narrations where you never think about the fact that there is a person reading the lines. The lines are simply there in your head.

ETA:

-Some reviewers label the characters as narcissists. Not me. I see them as good and as bad as anyone else.

-Maybe I should mention that travels are made to Europe (Britain and Italy), but they are not the prime setting. That is NY.

[Dax · Rating 5 out of 5]

Salter is a special writer, and this is another special work. One of those quiet novels that speaks volumes. Nedra and Viri are complex characters; Nedra with her desperate desire for freedom, and Viri with his dependence and insecurities. At first I struggled with Nedra, but then I realized that while she is certainly selfish, she is also courageous. Viri, meanwhile, is the opposite; polite but cowardly.

This novel is really about change. About the fact that things will never be able to remain the same. If you try to resist the inevitability of change, to swim upstream against that current, you will just end up broken and dissatisfied. Viri realized this almost too late. Nedra perhaps a little too soon.

“The secret is to have the courage to live. If you have that, everything will sooner or later change.”

[Hux · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nope! There are certain books that just rub you up the wrong way. And my god, this book really rubbed me up the wrong way. I think the three reasons it irritated me so much was the stylised writing (loathed it), the incessant and banal dialogue (I'd say the book is 80% dialogue) and the story itself (utterly dripping with middle-class tedium). It reminded me of an article I read years ago about literary genres and tropes, one of which was the stream-of-consciousness novel about the bored couple getting a divorce. Well, get ready for some immensely dull middle-class people and their kids. (An additional gripe would be how horrifically American this book is but we'll ignore that since we've got so much else to work with).

So the writing style is basically lots of short sentences occasionally interspersed with sudden endings that contain verbs and adjectives. Such as: 'The autumn came. Light danced over the crisp leaves. Marjorie was holding a cup, casually, alone, pale. The house was alone. It stood in shadows. Outside there was a name being called, silently, briskly, hard. Clouds gathered.'

I'm not sure how you would describe this style (or if it even has a name) but I found it painful to read. The stop/start nature of it, the jarring means of staggering along with such limitation and simplicity was awful. It's almost as if the book was written for children with simplistic prose and obvious platitudes (things glitter a lot, the light shines a lot, leaves crunch under feet). It's just very dull, obvious, and uninteresting but (like stream-of-consciousness writing) has the distracting effect of appearing clever and fluid when it's actually quite bland and prosaic. Then we come to the dialogue (of which there is a LOT). The book is more play than novel but again the conversations are tedious.

"These are beautiful," Eve said.
"I think these are better."
"Sixty dollars a dozen. What will you use them for?"
"You always need wineglasses."
"Aren't you afraid they'll break?"
"The only thing I'm afraid of are the words ordinary life,'" Nedra said.
"Too bad about Arnaud," Neil said.
"It's horrible."
"Eve says he... may never talk right again," he said to the water glass. He gad a thin mouth, the words leaked out.
"They don't know."
"Would you like some tea?" Eve asked.
"Let me make it," Nedra said, rising quickly to her feet. She disappeared into the kitchen.
"Rotten weather, isn't it?" Neil murmured after a pause.
"Yes."
"It's a lot colder than... last winter," he said.
"I guess it is."
"Something to do with... the earth's orbit... I don't know. We're supposed to be entering a new ice age."
"Not another one," she said.

It's essentially that kind of thing for 300 pages. Meandering, dull, middle-class conversations that reiterate the banal state of their lives. And while that might be the point of these conversations, an author really ought to be able to convey the tedium of life without forcing me to experience it for myself. And while we're on the subject of life being boring and pointless, why do so many authors who want to explore this particular theme (won't somebody please think of the poor middle-class people) always seem to imply that there is an alternative? There isn't. That's life. You haven't discovered anything we didn't already know. I truly loathe this kind of middle-class navel-gazing. That it came wrapped in such infantile writing, such a mundane dialogue-heavy narrative, only increased my anger. That all being said, however, there are some who will probably love this book. It takes no time to read and that might be enough to convince you it was good (rather than simplistic and empty).

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a true rarity for me. Not the one star, I'm not shy about doling those out. Not my lack of enthusiasm entering it; I'd just finished the marvelous "The Skin" by Curzio Malaparte so it would take quite something for me jump right into the next tale. Not my I found puzzlement as, after trudging through a needlessly florid, atmospheric chapter crammed with oddly hyper-selfconscious poetic language, I read the back flap description and wondered why I had picked this up in the first place: I take a lot of books out of the library for many reasons that I often forget. No, this book has made me make an exception to one of my cardinal rules of reading. I stopped reading well before my "give it the old college try" limit of 100 pages or a quarter of the total length, whichever comes first. The edition I took from the library is 308 pages, I made it to page 34.

The language was bad enough -- every noun had to have an adjective, many adjectives their adverb, and every description was self-consciously "off" in a "poetic" manner. This gets tiresome quickly in poetry, in prose it's unbearable. It doesn't give the Tom Robbins impression that it's pushing the bounds of cogent simile and metaphor for absurd or surreal reasons (though Robbins himself only ever accomplished this at his very best). It's doing it to be clever, to show off, and provides nothing, even if you scan it as a poem. It's preening and egoistic.

The sexism was bad enough -- I don't accept or recognize any claims to generational or period language, as there was no apparent justification for the voice and great contemporary pieces don't exhibit this denigration without cause, and their examples are numerous. The narrator is blithely unaware that women exist as independent beings rather than constructs of their male co-characters. Is this impression unfair and might it get resolved with fleshed out, Bechdel-test-passing characterization and independent thought as the narrative progresses? I don't give a shit because...

The narrative was bad enough -- dotted here and there with a self-conscious I, an I that is obviously and intentionally unrelated to any of the characters this I describes or the events this I observes. Characters exist like paper dolls with only the most declarative motivations and emotions. The plot jerks forward violently through time, like flipping through a very boring calendar. Their dialogue is snappy, I'll grant, but I couldn't care less about what they had to say. And their names are all stupid.

All of this was bad enough, but here is what stopped me. On the covers of this book, descriptors such as "extraordinary," "masterpiece," "remarkable" (shame James Wolcott), and draws comparisons to Cheever, O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, sending them spinning in their graves. What made me stop this so-praised book is very simple: it was published in 1975, presumably duly edited, and kept in print until at least 1995 which is when my edition was printed. In all this time, apparently no one noticed this:

It contains a very simple math error.

The action opens up in 1958, the protagonist has two young daughters at least old enough to ice skate, his wife is 28, his year of birth is stated as 1928. And on page 34 he is described as being 32. Even if we accept he was born in early 28, the pace of the novel puts that description no later than the spring of 1959. There's absolutely no indication that we've touched on brief events three years apart and scanning ahead there's no similar massive jumps of dates. That description came, for all any reasonable reader has the right to tell, at the absolute latest in 1959.

This is absurd. The writer and publisher and reviewers and whatever continued readership it has or had is too full of their pride for reading "'serious' 'literature'" to have noticed over 20 years of publishing a math error in the bloody first few dozen pages. It's not laziness, it's self-serving, self-satisfied narcissism. Avoid at all costs.