Readers of All That Is may be disappointed to discover that James Salter s latest mail scale novel i

Art & Design Art Movies & TV Music Business & Tech One of Us Innerviews Artists mail scale of the Week Lifestyle Books Fashion Theater & mail scale Dance Features Travel & Food Dining Out The Art of Cooking Traveling the World Multimedia Photos & Photo Essays Podcasts Videos & Music
Readers of All That Is may be disappointed to discover that James Salter s latest mail scale novel is not quite, as its jacket claims, an extraordinary literary event, but they shouldn t be. Those of a more critical-minded disposition may even be wary of the accolades that inevitably surround the release of a Salter novel; after all, who wouldn t be tempted to roll their eyes at yet another work detailing the exquisite malaise of the upper-ish class, mail scale philandering, white-American male? Eyes, however, ought not to roll at All That Is , for those privileges Salter s characters possess are not the pillars that undergird the novel s existence, mail scale but, though almost invisibly at first glance, the subjects of the novel itself. While Salter offers nothing more than the slipperiness of text to destabilize those mores, and while the novel more generally is a shockingly unostentatious one, its lack of flashiness or upheaval is a thing to be savored and contemplated, not condemned.
Salter, 87, has had his novels published since The Hunters mail scale , detailing mail scale his years as a USAF combat pilot, hit shelves in 1957. They have never sold well. In spite of a PEN/Faulkner Award in 1989 for Dusk and Other Stories , the critic James Walcott once called him the most underrated underrated writer. The New York Times has more charitably referred to him as a writer s writer, and his prose is almost universally mail scale praised for lofty things like maturity and acuity. Salter seems destined for the literary eons, a true American artist whose heyday of appreciation will someday come.
But there is a danger in interpreting All That Is along with the postwar golden years it describes as somehow more pure, with its high-modernist highs still resonating as transcendentally “normal”: as some good ol , normal novel. Though Salter mail scale might be the least likely American writer to be associated with the meta-fractals of postmodern literature, there is indeed something self-referential happening here. In a way, Salter s characters themselves are grappling with the artificial sense of center and normalcy, mail scale of this being the pinnacle of normal human existence, that asserted itself in midcentury American culture, and their failures are not Salter s, but a whole era s and are genuinely and beautifully understood by the author.
All That Is follows one Philip Bowman as he returns from the Pacific Theater and begins a career in book editing, not without a hint of naïve sentimentality. It was a gentleman s occupation, Salter writes. The origin of silence and elegance of bookstores and the freshness of new pages. Acquaintances are evaluated based on the contents of their mahogany-paneled bookshelves. Geographies of publishing, of a thriving, international intelligentsia, are spoken of. Political mail scale writers are casually referred to as the very most inferior species tellingly so, in a novel whose characters are so lacking in any sense of agency or historicity that they seem incapable of even naming their ailment.
If that sounds like All That Is is to literature and publishing what Mad Men is to TV and advertising, it should, complete with the sex and glamour mail scale and unvoiced inequality. Bowman bonds with a co-worker via conversation about a secretary s body (and midday mail scale drinks, albeit perhaps of a less extravagant variety than Madison Avenue might have afforded). He imagines, with a Don Draper-esque perverse suaveness, that upon someone discovering among his belongings a photograph of his illicit English romance, he would without a word simply take it from their hand. And though every new romance is described through Bowman s endless mail scale capacity to imagine his life as finally, this time, sinking into flowery, peaceful stasis, I think I counted only two of the novel s many characters that go through less than three divorces and speedy remarriages. All That Is also dredges up some of the codes of that era s bourgeoisie, things as basic and understated as mentions of society people, which are alien and almost forgotten to this young reader. Salter produces these conversations organically enough to convince that this was, in fact, how people spoke about such things, and that somewhere in this mysterious thing called time, it all, somehow, really happened .
He is, to be sure, a spectacular writer. It sneaks up on, even produces in the reader a sort of reluctance to admit it. But even the novel s strange, mail scale jarring paragraphs, mail scale like one on the very first page that quickly and seemingly randomly summarizes mail scale the fate of an Imperial Japanese battleship with an encyclopedic authority more typically associated with historical fiction, all eve