James Salter is 85, and just published his first novel in 30 years. The reviews were intriguing, so I found a used copy of earlier work: Light Years, published in 1975.
It begins with a very lyrical bird’s-eye description of a river on a winter’s day:
We dash the black river, its 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. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.
I love a book that begins with a gorgeous invocation. To this day I can almost quote the first sentence of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, which I first read 40 years ago:
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.
Like Wolfe’s book, Salter’s scopes down to the story of a family. The camera zooms in, we see a stone house on the river’s bank, and a family living in the house: a father, a mother, and two daughters. It is 1958. They entertain, they shop, they celebrate holidays. We watch, as though through a window. They are stylish, educated, sophisticated, successful. The woman is alluring:
One wants to enter the aura surrounding her, to be accepted, to see her smile, to have her exercise that deep, imputed tendency to love.
She is a woman whose cool remark forms the mood of a dinner; the man seated next to her smiles. She knows what she is doing, that is the core of it; still, how could she know? Her acts are unrepeated. She does not perform. Her face is a face that electrifies—that sudden, exploding smile—and yet, she somehow gives nothing.
The narrator of this book would seem to be in love with this woman. We grow wary—it’s a bit over the top, like a high-gloss real-estate supplement. Also a bit sententious, like a Terence Malick movie. But the writing is glorious and even as we see Viri, the husband, and Nedra, the wife, moving elegantly through their lives, we see their secret discontents, too. Viri, an architect, makes a good living, but wants something more:
He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family, what else is there to long for, to hope? Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was coming.
And yet:
There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams…one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.
Nedra has a different discontent: she wants to be free, wants to blow up the whole arrangement and strike out on her own.
The sun was at its apogee. She was conscious, as if it were a moment of weightlessness, that her life, too, was at its apex; it was sacred, floating, ready to change direction for the final time.
“You know, I think about divorce,” she said. “and Viri is such a good father. He loves his children, so, but that isn’t what stops me. It isn’t all the legal business and argument, the arrangements that have to be made. The really depressing thing is the optimism of it all.”
And so we have this paradox: the narrator, not to mention all the other characters in the novel, look at Viri and Nedra as the perfect couple living the perfect life. But they do not see themselves from this perspective—they look out to the world for gratification. Each has an affair. For Viri it is an obsession with a younger woman, for Nedra an adventure, a matter of the senses.
But they are devoted parents, and the descriptions of what it feels like to be a parent are striking. Here is one:
[H]e reads to them, as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning the earth at their feet. There are stories he has never heard of, and others he has known as a child, these stepping stones that are there for everyone. What is the real meaning of these stories, he wonders, of creatures that no longer exist, even in the imagination: princes, woodcutters, honest fishermen who live in hovels. 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 which 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.
Over 307 pages we follow Viri and Nedra, and also their friends. The travel, they divorce. Their children grow up and marry. Salter slips comfortably into their minds and then back out again, so we see what they see, but also what they don’t. In the process, he accomplishes what few writers can: he makes the ordinary seem remarkable.
They are in their late 20s when the book begins, and only in their late 40s when it ends. Yet by the end they seem ancient, exhausted, and they look back at their former lives, their heyday, just as their friends always have, and as we have, with envy and a kind of despair. They have lost the Eden that they never fully appreciated in the first place. That's how it is with Edens.
Salter has the reputation as a writer of ‘erotic” fiction because he is good at describing physical intimacy. But he also writes of death with the same skill—patiently, carefully, sensuously. There are three extended descriptions of death in Light Years. Each runs for about 10 pages. They are rather soft focus, I suppose, without agony or terror. We watch the characters fade and expire, in possession of themselves and more or less at peace, with a wistful appreciation of all that life has meant to them.
She died like her father, suddenly, in the fall of the year. As if leaving a concert during a passage she loved, as if giving up an hour before the light. Or so it seemed. She loved the autumn, she was a creature of blue, flawless days, the sun of their noons hot as the African coast, the chill of their nights immense and clear. As if smiling and acting quickly, as if off to a country, a room, an evening finer than ours.
It’s a lovely description. I could never quite surrender my reservations about Light Years, the suspicion that I was being seduced by all the gloss and glamour. But that won’t stop me from reading more James Salter books.
