Customer Reviews

Light Years

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The courage to live life as it changes, as the faults that went unseen in the initial rush of novelty emerge, to adapt, continue and be happy, content, this I believe is the heart of this work. The small imperfections that erode to fatal flaws as the years pass, the union of marriage that grows old, and regret and a desire for something new becomes an obsession. And if the freedom is regained can it ever be as it was anticipated. How can anything desired for years, embellished and romanticized for decades ever deliver contentment?

The marriage of Nedra and Viri act more like a parenthetical that contains the entire novel and its events, than they serve as the focal point. The dozens of friends on almost as many levels of intimacy all revolve around the married couple, the former couple, or the individuals they believe they become for a second time. Is contentment the equivalent of stagnation; is it predestined for most, or voluntary for the few?

Mr. Salter continues in, "Light Years", what he has done in all 3 of the novels I have read thus far. The people he creates transcend whatever story he presents them in. The personalities he creates are wonderful not because they entertain with their uniqueness or their contrived eccentricities, but because of how normal they are, or perhaps familiar. This is not to suggest they are cliché, they are everything but that, they are people you know, people you may meet, or a character that you find a part of you is within.

One of the beauties of what this man is capable of with his writing is reaching very deeply into the thoughts and fears that inhabit almost all of us. He does not presume, he does not judge or lecture, he just lets you look through your minds eye, and decide for yourself. There are the affairs, but even when the most intimate of acts takes place he handles it in a manner that is clear, pure, evocative, but never does he stoop to the profane. His treatment of the females he writes about is done with respect; he does not objectify the women he writes of even if they seem to offer themselves in a manner that would justify the word object. Males and females are flawed, they err, and they can seek answers and redemption, and again he lets you decide, he does not hand down Judgement.

This is an amazing writer that I either missed, or many have, as his is some of the best work I have ever read. Comparisons are really unnecessary, take what you like about your favorite writers, and you will find something to love in this man's work.

The main characters are named Viri and Nedra, and Lord knows that signals "pretentious." Ignore all that. No one writes about what happens between men and women better than Salter; you can see your own relationships in the 308 pages it takes to track the glory and fall of this marriage between an architect and his thin, troubled wife. And the sense of place! Here he is on the lure the Hamptons held for Nedra: "She was a creature of blue, flawless days, the sun of their noons hot as the African coast, the chill of the nights immense and clear." I started the book in that place on a morning so grey the sky and ocean merged; I read through the rain; I finished at night. A day well spent.

James Salter takes you so deeply inside the marriage of Nedra and Viri that you know these people as well as your own family before the book is done. It is a heartbreaking portrayl of love that turns to mere companionship. The beautiful wife, Nedra, seeks soemthing she cannot attain from her husband, nor from her affairs, nor from fleeing to Europe. She stands as one of the most completely-drawn women in American ficiton, a modern Madame Bovary. As the husband and wife grow apart, their children become aloof, the house they create falls into disrepair. It is the most accurate portrayl of the joys and sadness of modern marriage that I have read

. . . enjoys being seduced by an environment created by a writing style that artfully explores a soft nether region where poetry leaves off and prose kicks in.

What is it about this book that, on the whole, captivates and fascinates even though none of the component parts seem distinguishable?

The story line and character development are certainly thin. I still don't have any evidence why Nedra is "all that." It's just a given. And who are these folks anyway? I don't think any of them shop at Walmart, fret over gas prices or worry about being backstabbed at work. Getting divorced? Moving to Europe? No problem. Plenty of mystery money to pay for everything.

And so many abrupt surprises: Poof, someone dies. Poof, two people fall into bed. Poof, they're divorced. Maybe Maslow was right - freedom from financial worry apparently leaves more room for social acceptance anxiety.

But how to resist such a seductive and ideal world so well shielded from hardship - the kind of world easy to imagine while reading fiction offerings from Harpers or the New Yorker. Everyone is comfortably well off, drinking fine wine, telling tales of beautiful vacations, finding willing partners to fall into bed with. Even when sex is temporarily unavailable, the food, the quality of conversation and the backdrop scenery are incredible - and paid for.

Best of all, this ideal world is created with remarkably few words. Each word or phrase resembles a little dot, carefully written and placed. Once they are all connected in the imagination, the reader is immersed in that special world.

Too bad the book can't just go on forever, or be turned into a 10+ episode PBS mini-series a la Brideshead Revisited or even 17 volumes worth of "Master and Commander." Perhaps that's just another evidence of success, leaving just a little hungry or thirsty, wondering if one more fragment lies just around the corner.

I like this book for reasons others disliked it and cannot rave about it for the reasons that others did.

To begin with, the flowery (but sometimes dark) prose took some getting used to, but I really liked it toward the end. I didn't like the fact that Salter didn't follow gramatical rules many times, such as incomplete sentences, and there were times when I could simply not understand what he was saying.

I was able to enjoy the book, even though the plot was, as one reviewer put it, incidental. Anybody who is looking for action when they read a book will not find it here. However, I have grown to like books about thoughts and emotions on relationships, which seems to be the premise of this novel.

The back of the book leads you to believe that they have this beautiful marriage that has small cracks in it. I never felt that Nedra and Viri had anything more special than a respectful friendship with the responsibility of children, and from the beginning there were no small cracks....there were giant cracks.

In the very first chapter, Nedra is described by another woman as somebody who cares for nobody but herself. Even so, perhaps Nedra is happy with her relationship but not fulfilling to Viri, who looks for happiness elsewhere, and somehow thinks he is deceiving his wife, although for anybody has been in this situation knows that she knows. It is not until then (at least as far as the author shows) that she begins to look for happiness elsewhere. And by some dialogue later in the book between her and Viri, she isn't even trying to hide it.

So, I find this an interesting story of a marriage that falls apart, and I look to it to keep from falling into the same traps, although if Nedra is as self serving as some characters suggest, there would be no avoiding this demise. Just don't make the mistake of thinking the story starts with a beautiful marriage. There are other seemingly disturbed relationships which are described in the book that you wish you could see more of, but it is enough to show that every relationship has it's problems according to Salter. There fails to be one married couple in the book that is hopelessly in love with each other.

As one final note, I may have gone my whole life without disovering Salter and am glad I found him. The reason I found out about him was a character of John Irving's in "A Son of a Circus" was reading "A Salter". I think the author is well worth reading, and intend to read his other works.

I can still remember a time when drinking was an unmitigated delight. Rightly or wrongly, I felt freed by it of my worst qualities: humorlessness, abject obedience to authority, a fascination with judgment, morbid self-control.

Drinking, I became less narrow. I became, for myself, finally, unpredictable. At the age of twenty-nine, I had found a path into the open meadow, or the great teeming city, of life.

Let me put that another way: suddenly, for the first time, I was having fun being an adult.

It was around that time that I read Under the Volcano. I loved the book and I liked to read passages from it aloud.

But I didn't understand it. In addition to its exotic locale, it described an exotic experience: alcohol as an act of suicide. Alcohol as a flight not to life but from it.

If I were to read Under the Volcano today, it would not be the same book. (Re-read books are never the same, which is why there is no such thing as re-reading.) Lowry would now be describing an experience that has become a possibility, perhaps even an inevitability--an experience that, however faintly (or probably not very faintly) I now recognize.

So too does Light Years, by James Salter, a book I've just finished and which has shaken me as few works of art ever have.

Its account of the beauty of marriage, and of its pleasures, and of its terrible and insidious forms of loneliness, would have once been incomprehensible to me. I suppose I would have recognized--but without nostalgia, which makes recognition matter--its account of marriage as a form of refuge. And as a sight of sudden, permanent moments of beauty. But I wouldn't have recognized its account of marriage as catastrophically, terribly lonely, and as always, at some level, doomed.

So I would not have understood the book, as I could not understand Under the Volcano.

I'm saying that I would have loved Light Years, as I loved Under the Volcano, but I would have experienced its primary theme, its motivating truth, as exotic, charming, and irrelevant.

I think that Light Years can't be wholly felt unless the reader has been married and a parent for a while--probably for years. That fact (and I believe it's a fact) might explain the book's otherwise inexcusable lack of fame.

(There is no corresponding excuse for the neglect of Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, which is one of very few post-war American masterpieces of erotica--are there any others?--and which, like all of Salter's work, continues to be suspiciously un-read.)

Light Years describes with unsurpassed delicacy the mysteries of domestic suburban married life. It gives a heartwrenching account of parenthood--as heartwrenching (by which I mean true) as any I know. This book could not have been written by a person who did not love marriage and parenthood and who had not known great happiness as a husband and a father.

But also great unhappiness; and it's always in unhappiness, as Tolstoy famously noted, where the story lies.

I don't feel inclined to summarize the plot. Its basic elements are relatively predictable, as all plots are, or eventually become, for anyone who passes his or her life among novels. The details of plot don't matter, anyway--not in this book, not ever. What matters in literature are formal accomplishment, stylistic strangeness, and honesty.

Light Years possesses all three of those qualities in abundance. Reading it, I often had to stop after a few pages, as if to re-assemble myself. The novel seemed to be--it was--smashing me into pieces. It often left me breathless. I confess that as the novel drew to a close (although I did not love its final pages) I wept bitterly.

Salter has divided Light Years into five parts, each built around what he frames as discreet stages of adult married life. Passing through each stage, one recognizes their truthfulness. More generally, one recognizes that there is great cruelty in truth. That we recognize truth by its cruelty.

The book's celebration of the basic pleasures of life acquires as it a proceeds a kind of indisputable force. No American writer since Hemingway evokes the pleasures of food and drink, the experience of preparing food and eating it, as exquisitely as Salter. In fact, his evocations are better than Hemingway's. (No doubt it's no coincidence that both men spent a great deal of time in France.)

Salter is equally gifted at using setting to construct the emotional content of his art. His eye for the nuance and significance of light is unparalleled in modern American literature, perhaps in all of American literature.

My copy of the book was published by North Point Press and has on its cover a painting by Pierre Bonnard. This choice seems exactly right. Both Salter and Bonnard present the truth--the truth as I've experienced it, anyway--of domestic life: They see its colors, its light, its stillness, its sadness and joy, its tendency to dissolve into something which cannot be thought about and so cannot be contained.

One realizes reading Salter that of course all politics are local because all life is local. We can't feel beyond ourselves. And what causes us to feel? Landscape, weather, nearby bodies, other animals, physical activity, the voices and the words of those we love, human--especially female--beauty, wit, the intelligence and dignity of children. Food and drink. Now and then, too rarely, a work of art. And the sanctuaries of sleep and bedding and the bewilderment of beloved flesh in close proximity to our own. The bewilderment of touch and scent. The boundless province of sex and its indigenous despair.

It is a book about aging and the primary act of resistance we have against aging, which is falling in love.

We see, if we are ready, that beyond those things nothing else matters. The rest is not silence but noise.

I suspect this book will be impossible to read if you don't understand that women are real and have emotional lives that are completely, permanently their own.

Which might make it impossible for most men to read and probably explains why I found reading it so difficult and why it is generally, unjustly unknown.

I think Light Years is one of the great American novels of the 20th century and I'll read it again when I have the strength to face it.

Like Salter's other books and stories, Light Years is elegiac and haunting. Captures a feeling for a time in post-WWII America when hopes were high, all things seemed possible. An excellent portrayal of the interior life of a marriage, and the subjects of betrayal and separation, lust, and aging.

"...photographs, noons. I adore you." Viri makes up these lines to his lover, Kaya. How do I express this-- what I hold in me of this book? I've read it twice, the first time, I was fifteen and sitting in the back of my parents' car and read it whole in four hours in the heat and dry luster of Northern California summertime. I memorized that line, the above one, and when I fell slowly and inexorably into passionate crazy love with *this other author* I spent long days at the beach, scrawling Salter's lines in the sand with a thin piece of driftwood. Salter captures the dense erotic luster of relationships like no one else. I fell in love with this book. It taught me so many things. Ah, I've forgotten about the second time I read it. Yes, that was something. I read it because I knew I had missed the message the first time around. Thoroughly passion-crazed in my own life, I needed to feel the supple prose slip me into dream-world again. What a lovely book. Ai, and read Salter's *Dusk*, as well.

A wonderfully-written, poignant portrait of a marriage. The end filled me with sadness and the chapters were consistently memorable. Salter is a miniaturist -- that is, he very effectively evokes isolated scenes with memorable details -- but he manages to convey time's passage as well. Salter has to be one of the top English stylists of the century. I marked the novel down one star only because I thought the fate of one of the central characters was not believable.

[Four and a half stars] Whether the portrait of a marriage or the panorama of a Zeitgeist, this rich and luminous picture is painted in short impressionistic strokes that dissolve continuity and show Salter as the miniaturist par excellence. Months pass, sometimes years; characters come and go virtually unannounced; a brief observation, a tiny anecdote, can illuminate entire lives. Viri (Vladimir), a New York architect, and Nedra, his wife, lead an apparently idyllic existence in their house by the Hudson, surrounded by friends, children, and pets. But even such happiness is not complete. As they move into affairs, the rhythm of yearning pulls each in different directions, strengthening one and devastating the other. But even as the story moves beyond their inevitable (but amicable) divorce, it continues to hold them in that web of desolation and surprising beauty which has characterized this exquisitely-written book from the beginning.