In some ways, “A Sport and a Pastime,” James Salter’s 1967 novel, is a predecessor to “50 Shades of Grey.” Both were sex-filled bestsellers, but one was dismissed by critics as pornography whereas the other was praised for its insight on sex and beautiful language.
Salter never had another hit like “Pastime” and, like Faulkner and Fitzgerald, to whom he has often been compared, he dabbled in Hollywood on the crest of his early success. After those screenwriting years, he returned to writing well-received novels and eventually cemented a reputation as a “writer’s writer.”
“All That Is,” Salter’s first novel in 34 years, concerns Philip Bowman, a former American naval officer who fought off the coast of Okinawa in World War II. He gets an education (Harvard) and finds a position as a book editor in Manhattan (it was easier then).
What’s interesting about the novel is how impersonal it sometimes feels. Salter himself was a West Point graduate who spent his time in the military as a U.S. Air Force officer off the coast of Okinawa. But Bowman doesn’t seem so much a war veteran as someone conjured from the Pacific Ocean, with no past. His family is hardly mentioned and, after the first couple of chapters, his wartime experience is an aside.
Instead, the novel spends time on the relationship issues of Bowman and his circle of acquaintances in the elite Manhattan publishing world. Salter has decades of experience when it comes to writing sex scenes, so it’s impressive how he can write so many in this book without using repetitive or ornate writing.
“All That Is” goes through three decades of American history without being a historical novel. Bowman’s life continues, love comes and goes, but the politics of the Cold War and the Vietnam War don’t make any impression on his psyche. The JFK assassination is mentioned once. Sure, Susan Sontag makes a cameo (Bowman and some of his friends go to one of her lectures), but it seems as if Bowman is merely nodding to a friend (Sontag was a fan of Salter’s work) rather than seriously engaging with historical ideas.
Salter manages to make its historical ignorance feel natural by remaining firmly in the intimate lives of his characters. Other novels that take place in the past may try to mirror historical narratives with their characters’ personal lives, but Salter finds universalizing the personal a trivializing act. Bowman’s postwar New York experience is not the same as everyone else’s, and the resistance to interpretation is what gives an emotionally impersonal sheen to Salter’s writing. Any feeling of kinship is a projection of the reader’s.
James Salter’s great talent is that he can create characters — intelligent, thoughtful, who speak openly and clearly about their deeply emotional problems and provide sharp insights — without any hint of artifice. Their intelligence and insight is revealed, for instance, when one talks about drinking:
“’My daddy liked to drink,’ Eddins said. ‘He used to say he was more interesting when he drank. My mother used to say, interesting to who?’”
The author’s greatest talent, though, is that his narrative voice is even more insightful than his characters’. His prose’s lucidity shows that human communication is inherently dysfunctional and immature compared to novel-writing itself. Consider a passage in his best-received 1975 novel, “Light Years”:
“He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly 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.”
Salter, 87 years old, brings wisdom, beautiful prose and a certain kind of impenetrability to the story of Philip Bowman. But for the author, just because a life is written in a book doesn’t mean that the life has to be open like one.