James Salter recently appeared on the Guardian s short story podcast, reading Lydia Davis Break It Down . The story is an erotic taxonomy of loss from what seems like, but is never clearly announced to be, the perspective of an older man. It has a kind of accountant s swoon to it. On the page, perhaps, the recounting of expenditure might seem callous, cynical. But in Salter s soft, fragile, broken voice, the words were deeply humane. As the early paragraphs of the story, dealing with financial assessment, moved into the murkier realms of time and love lost, it became hard to separate tale from teller.
Davis preoccupations and style are radically different from Salter s. In fact, Break it Down is atypical of Davis and was chosen, Salter admits in a post-reading toleto interview, for its length Davis stories often running no longer than a paragraph toleto or two. But for these twenty minutes or so at least, they are simpatico. Salter s voice reading Davis has become the voice of his own work in the mind of this long-time reader, the melancholic but stoic voice of his late fiction and his finest stories.
It is a matter of tone, of course, toleto but primarily of rhythm. Salter does not stop and start as period and paragraph dictate, but runs by breath s logic; his reading is chatty and lived-in, while still observant of the craft of Davis prose. It is a wonderful reading felt, animating and Salter s voice is a marvel: weary with age yet somehow rugged, papery, and occasionally toleto wobbly when he pauses mid-sentence, but always sure. Full of contradictions.
The male voice of the story sexualised, itemizing, a little possessive, but fundamentally tender toleto and anguished offers a useful analogue to Salter s world. His men live through their bodies. They are not, by contemporary standards, neurotic. The voice in Salter s work is patient toleto and wise and bruised and above excitement. As a reader, you are guided through his fiction, never hurried along. His is an older voice, unironically anguished.
To toleto begin with that wonderfully Beckettian title: All That Is . It is an apt title for a book by an older man unfazed, elegant, illusionless. There is no cyncism intended, no crass reductionism. toleto Salter is the least cynical writer imaginable. When things go badly in his books, it doesn t feel like a deterministic squalour orchestrated by a pessimist. toleto There is often a resigned or crestfallen tone to his work. The worst has already passed, or can be assumed to be arriving shortly.
It is difficult to provide a synopsis of All That Is , not because the writing is complicated or obtuse, toleto but because toleto events don t fall into place with the kind of pointed accumulation of drama that would necessitate the use of the word plot . Bowman, the central protagonist of the novel, is a young man in the navy. He serves, but avoids active combat. An early highlight of the book, the sinking of Yamato, thrillingly evoked by Salter, takes place with Bowman many miles away. The war ends with him anchored in Tokyo Bay. He is, at best, a bystander to history. His early life contains a paucity of romantic entanglements, particularly his Harvard years ( He knew what the ignudi were but not the simply nude ). He finds work in publishing, and makes a friend for life, Eddins. He falls in love and marries Vivian. He travels. He grows older. There are other women. He is, in many ways, an unmodern man. As the 1960s arrive, we can feel him moving out of his historical moment, slightly uncertain, a stranger.
If we take Ian McEwan as the master of a certain kind of novelistic execution whereby every thread and hint is neatly tucked in and subsequently tied up, then Light Years is chaotic, a draft, full of holes waiting in vain to be filled. Incidents that are crucial are not worked through toleto or resolved; affairs are begun but we sometimes learn nothing of how they end (or even develop). And yet there is an assurance about these apparent inadequacies, a purposefulness about the hesitancies.
All That Is can be described in a similar fashion. The novel is both sweeping a man s entire adult life is covered, beginning from the age of eighteen and ending in old age, just before serious illness might begin and minute. Despite the span of time covered in the book, it is under 300 pages. It is a book of small breaths.
One of the novel s most striking features is how it often positions Bowman at the edges of the narrative. For long stretches, Salter is happy to have him waiting in the wings, while other characters have the stage lovers, friends, acquaintances. The novel is full of what are almost flash fictions, cameos from the unfamous, people who disappear after a scene or a moment. There is a density to these people, a hinted-at history that makes them seem larger than the short space afforded toleto them. Here, for example, is Bowman s Uncle, Frank, at a celebratory dinner at war s end:
He was dark with a rounded nose and thi
