Customer Reviews

Solo faces

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What makes SOLO FACES such a good read is, in part, 1) Salter's lean, understated, "honest" style, 2) his concern for all his characters, and 3) his ability to write about climbing intelligently without overdoing it. As far as I know, no novelist but Salter has pulled #3 off successfully. The novel is based (more or less) on the life of Gary Hemming (Rand in the book), who made a heroic rescue of two German climbers (Italians in the book) who were stranded on the daunting face of the Dru. Rand is a believable character: humble and shy, but confident and unable (or unwilling) to develop attachments to the various women that shuffle in and out of his life. I did not love the book's final chapter, which seems too obscure and unsatisfying. But maybe I just didn't get it. All in all, this is a very fine novel by one of our most underread writers.

James Salter's novel tells the story of Rand, a solitary man in his late 20s, with a fatal attraction to mountain climbing. We meet him on a hot, hazy day doing a roofing job on a church in Los Angeles. Quiet, focused, he watches warily the heedless young man working with him and then catches him just in the last moment as he falls from the roof. This same drama plays out again later in the novel, as Rand saves the lives of other mountain climbers, high in the French Alps, in wintry, bone chilling conditions.

One case of heroics makes him a media celebrity, and for a time he is an American in Paris enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. But the time passes, and he returns again to the austere, stoic life of a climber, growing older, with no assets, no home, no one who will love him on his own terms. He has only his desire to continue climbing and the need to take ever greater risks. Emptied of every other need, his lonely heroism is an ironic portrayal of the individual who strives against all odds to achieve impossible goals.

Salter's writing style is crystal clear, always vivid. He tries for no special effects, just a precise choice of words, sentence after sentence, and an unblinking eye for detail. If you have the slightest trepidation about heights, the descriptions of the climbs make your heart race. Master of his matter-of-fact style, Salter moves beyond emotion and the romance of adventure to capture the excitement of being fully in the present moment and intensely alive.

This great book by Salter who has authored many great books may just be his best. The book is about rock climbing. That sport is the most extreme of the extreme sports but also the most solitary and therefore most spiritual and lyrical as it is so often done alone and any mistake is almost certainly a fatal one. The book begins on the top of a church in L.A. where our main character Rand is doing yet another impermanent odd job in an equally impermanent location repairing roofs for a summer, a situation that allows him to retain his most cherished possession, his freedom. And the ultimate expression of that freedom is climbing. Nothing holds Rand for long, no place and no woman, and so very soon in the novel he is off to the Swiss and French Alps, locations of some of the most heralded peaks including the sheer faced obelisks, the Eiger and the Dru. The book is full of climbing lore(including one mountain rescue based in fact) and that great theme of man versus nature as well as the writing style recalls Conrad and Hemingway. Salters sense of adventure as well as his aptitude to tell a story perfectly recalls both authors, but he has his own style and what he does with this adventure tale is completely his own. Salter shows the great romantic appeal of his hero Rand and he also shows the singular nature of such a character and how a life dedicated to legendary feats and life-in-peril daring can leave a man at some remove from others. The minor characters include climbing friends and the various women involved in Rand's love affairs. Though each of them a brief episode only the love episodes are poignant as they more than any other part of the book show how unreachably alone romantic Rand really is. Subtle scenes between men and women who say very little to each other but feel very real is something Salter is especially good at. Very very highly recommended to outdoor enthusiasts and lovers of pristine sentences strung gracefully together and which seem to catch the hard glint of the mountain sun itself. Salter is an author who has only written five novels,one story collection, and a memoir, each one is very much worth your while.

The saga of a man who feels restrained by conventions and flat ground. Unable to find peace in the heights of his job as a roofer of churches he travels to southern France to assault the Alps. Climbing alone he negotiates the granite faces of the mountains until he takes on their majestic qualities himself. When a friend is trapped on the mountain, he makes a daring one man rescue during a storm that brings him the notice he has always shunned. But glory is fleeting and he returns to the anonymity he prefers having satisfied the only person of importance in his life, himself. This superbly written prose includes a description of being struck by lightning that is so vivid that you feel it. Salter is without question one of America's great writers and this is one of his best

James Salter is one of America's finest writers, and his skills here match his other books.
Climbing and the inmost soul are Salter's subjects here, and he captures both with unerring eye and literary skills. Because he never overwrites, the casual reader may not fully appreciate the challenges that the author meets so elegantly. God and the devil are in the details, and in climbing (as in flying, about which Salter has written so well) lack of attention to detail can kill in instants. Readers who are also writers will slowly become aware of the fact that Salter never puts a word wrong and never uses more words than are necessary to communicate with the soul. Reading such work is reminiscent of looking at a seemingly simple but beautiful piece of sculpture or mechanical object in which every last detail has been honed to perfection and does its job correctly.
Why does this matter? Because if one reads the current wretched messes masquerading as quality fiction, for example in the NEW YORKER, one gets the sense of being asked to become involved in descriptions of navel lint, or more often of being asked to empathize with silly and unsympathetic people devoid of lives that involve risk.
So what has Salter done with SOLO FACES that transcends the current (02) wrtechedness? He puts us deep in the heart and soul, and makes us care about what these people are doing, and why. The climbing descriptions, despite being low key, will induce in the reader a sense of physical involvement that is (probably) measureable physiologically (heart rate, GSR, etc.). Anyone who wants to climb the Eiger is not sane, but deeply to be respected.

Salter ventures into places few writers ever go, with such grace and clarity that most can only hope to emulate. SOLO FACE is perhaps his best work to date.

Solo Faces is, like all other Salter works, almost adolescent in its insistence--on such well-worn trappings as romantic isolation, the heroic challenge of physical exertion, the honor of straight male comradship--and yet, despite the reliance on such usually hoary old saw-horse thematics, the book is compelling-- because felt: The mountain scenes seem achingly vivid, the fatigue, the exhilaration and ebb of yearning as abrupt and immediate as stone, ice and sunburn to the nervous-system. This is the most integral and "packed" of Salter's novels; perhaps a certain objective distance put the material into manageable perspective, even the dialogue seeming to mirror the "short-hand" of thought itself. What we get in a Salter novel is an idealized effigy or sculpture of an imagined arc of a single man's effort--perhaps throwing a discus, or reaching for a cloud--that could not be compromised with the horizontal medium of mere narrative, but required handfuls of glinting crystals, presented almost at random, without the necessity of chronology or verisimilitude, but true to our deeper, more "lovely" natures, as wild, half-tamed creatures, longing for the wind and the chase, the dare and the violation of harsh experience.

I bought this book as I enjoy inspiring adventure books. This novel is more a character study of an isolated climber who becomes somewhat of a legend but continues to struggle with interpersonal relationships.

From a climbing perspective, I found the stories mildly unfulfilling but understand now that that is not the central theme of the novel. But more importantly, I particular found the interpersonal relationships unfulfilling. Starting in Los Angeles where this common worker lived with a woman and her son, initially as a renter and eventually as a lover. Cut quickly to Europe to two significant and unfulfilled relationships although one has long-standing consequences. Back to Santa Barbara for a reunion with a fellow hunter and his wife ending in unsatisfied conflict.

Ok, I'm sure I'll be hammered as not intelligent enough to "get it". But the book did not satisfy my fascination with thrilling rock climbs and it certainly didn't satisfy my desire to watch characters connect in a fulfilling manner.

OK read but not a classic.

The first novel I read by Mr. Salter was, "The Hunters", which while deemed a novel was the result of his experiences as a combat pilot in Korea. In, "Solo Faces", he again describes an activity that ultimately is as lonely as being the sole occupant of a fighter aircraft. The primary difference would appear to be that climbing and all the danger involved, no matter how compulsive the desire to do it, is voluntary. It is true that in both instances there is a measure of safety, the climber is roped to another; on belay his safety in the hands of another. In Korea his character would have a wingman that was never to leave him, again was his measure of protection. Climbing partners fall, wingmen get shot down, ultimately the pilot and the climber are alone.

Again he explores the human motivation of those who climb, the less savory aspects of fellow climbers and the horrific results that can occur. The circle is expanded this time as more space is given to the effect the activity has on those who the climber is personally involved with, who cares about his health. Again the pilot was at war, he was not voluntarily flying dozens and dozens of missions. The climber is where he is by choice, so the fear and concern the activities generate may have similar names, but what catalyzes the emotions is fundamentally different.

Mr. Salter's writing is an amazing study of people. He certainly selects an environment that causes a description of what they do and why they do it to be appropriate. For me in these first two novels it is the people you remember more than the circumstances. It is not that the stories lack strength, quite the contrary; his people are just so fascinating.

All great novelists force us to reevaluate our definitions of sanity. That tradition began with the first modern novel, Don Quixote, and continues unabated. Indeed, the problem of sanity--what is it? who defines it? who is or is not sane?--is quite likely the defining theme of the novel.

In this regard, the novel has always been subversive.

But of course all art is subversive. The novel is particularly dangerous because of its ability to disguise its menace in the biblical conventions of storytelling. Consequently, prior to the development of photography the novel has had no rival in the arts to match its ability to appear benevolent, edifying, and traditional while in fact working to provoke, transform, even revolutionize society.

Certainly novels have met with resistance in the West--Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita--but that resistance is usually in reaction to sexual content and is fairly reliably a mark of greatness (novelty). So it is quite rare.

Given, then, the novel's peculiar advantages for sedition, why has it opted to focus on the problem of sanity?

Because the surest way to examine power in any culture is to isolate that culture's boundaries between what is sane and what is insane. Those boundaries don't only distinguish one culture from another; they also specify who runs the show.

James Salter has written two masterpieces--which is two more than most novelists--and both of them explore sanity. A Sport and a Pastime contemplates erotic love, which we both venerate as life's highest private experience and proscribe as a kind of irresponsible, obsessive madness. Light Years contemplates domestic family life, which we venerate as the central institution of responsible adult life, as the apotheosis of civilized happiness, yet often experience as a slow, inexorable descent into madness--as, in fact, a form of madness, and of cowardice.

Solo Faces concerns itself with the Western obsession with individual achievement, which Salter has decided to explore through mountain climbing, perhaps the most mythical (cliché) metaphor for individual achievement imaginable.

For those who love to climb--who live to climb--his careful depiction of that life will be reason enough to read the book. I would be surprised if there's a better account of climbing culture and its numerous idiosyncrasies.

For the rest of us, Solo Faces, unlike Salter's two great novels, is not especially noteworthy.

According to William Dowie (writing in his critical biography of Salter), the book began as a screenplay commissioned by Robert Redford. When Redford rejected the screenplay, Salter transformed it into a novel. As a consequence (I suspect), Solo Faces is marked by an uncharacteristic narrative awkwardness, especially in its earliest scenes. It lacks the organic coherence of Salter's enduring work.

I'll note two other disappointments: Salter's great strength as a novelist is his evocation of the inner life of women. Solo Faces concerns itself with the overwhelmingly masculine world of mountain climbing. So reading the book is a bit like watching a great hitter play defense. Secondly, the keenest pleasure this book offers is the pleasure of suspense. For this particular reader, suspense is a trivial, even annoying quality in a novel.

Nevertheless, one does find, as always, Salter's philosophical elegance--in this case, as it obtains to the heroism (insanity?) of obsessive individual achievement. That elegance is best captured in this exchange (spoiler!), which comes near the end of the book:

"I decided to see if I could shock her," Rand admitted. "So I told her the truth."
"Such as?"
"I told her I'd been climbing for fifteen years. For most of that, ten years anyway, it was the most important thing in my life. The only thing. I sacrificed everything to it. Do you know the one thing I learned from climbing? The single thing?"
"What?"
"It is of no importance whatsoever."

The novel's philosophical interest is plain to see when one applies observations like that to individual achievement generally--including, for example, the achievement of writing a novel.