The Books: “Light Years” (James Salter)

9780141188638H.jpgDaily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Light Years, by James Salter

Unbelievable book so full of great writing that you want to shout, “Slow down a minute! Give me a second to ABSORB this prose!!” I found the book almost unbearably intense at times, and yet I couldn’t exactly point to why. I read it when I was in my 20s, so I wonder if a small intimation of middle-age came to me through the book – and the loneliness I would experience … I don’t know. It’s an eerie book. There’s a deep sadness and loss being expressed – and yet a lot of the book is lengthy dinner parties, meetings with the tailor, playing games with the children … You can’t quite point to what is wrong, but … isn’t that the way life is a lot of the time? At least it is for me.

Light Years tells the story of a married couple – Nedra and Viri. They have two children. They seem to live a charmed life, a life of ease. They have a big house in Westchester. Nedra is the wife, a beautiful woman – the book starts in the late 1950s, and perhaps things are a bit simpler then, with assumptions not being questioned … As the book unfolds, we start to see (or sense) the cracks beneath the flawless picture. We’re not sure how it will go and if or when the cracks will be revealed but it is impossible to read the descriptions of their garden, the games they make up for their kids, their skating on the lake … without wondering when it will all end. This is due to Salter’s mastery of language. He is so so good. Again, like in Sport and a Pastime, much of the book is descriptive. The sky, the air, the trees, the river … and it is spare language, not sumptuous or anything like that. But the overall impression is one of the fleetingness of life and beauty … It’s a deeply sad book. I was shattered by the end of it.

It’s been years since I read it so much of the details of the plot are lost. I know that Nedra and Viri eventually split, and whatever silence was behind their union, whatever it was that was not being said, pours into the void, filling up their lives. If I remember correctly, Nedra has an easier time with the split, moving gracefully into single life as though she were born to it. I have to read it again.

Light Years seems, to me, to be a true middle-aged book. Sport and a Pastime (excerpt here) is a young man’s book, with a young man’s concerns … but here in Light Years, things are not so much in flux, people have settled, life has taken on its solid form – it is what it is (seemingly). Change is supposed to be good, right? If we don’t change, we die. But middle-aged people, with their bodies starting to go, their youth fading, having to make room for the next generation, all that … change is something to be feared. It rarely means something good. Light Years is full of that anxiety. It’s heartbreaking.

A great novel.

Here’s an excerpt: About that indefinable sadness: notice how in the excerpt below, which is all about family life – a “compact that will never end” – and while there is much to envy here, the calm beauty of being part of a group, a family … Salter at one point describes them all as “a group of devoted actors who know nothing beyond themselves, beyond the pile of roles from old …” That’s what I mean by sadness. It cannot be pointed to, nothing can be identified as “the thing that is wrong” – but it’s Salter’s gift as a writer, his eloquent and very specific choices of images – that gives to us the impression that all is not quite well.


EXCERPT FROM Light Years, by James Salter

Danny is less obedient; she has a stubborn quality. She is less beautiful. In the summer her leanness and tan skin conceal it. She goes out in the deep water in a rubber tube, daring, kicking like an insect. It is morning, the surf falling forward, its white teeth hissing on the shore. Viri watches, sitting on the sand. She waves at him, her shouts carried off by the wind. He understands suddenly what love of a child is. It overwhelms him like the line from a song.

Morning; the sea sound faint on the wind. His sunburned daughters walk on creaking floors. They pass their life together, in a compact that will never end. They go to the circus, to stores, the market shed in Amagansett with its laden shelves and fruits, to picnics, pageants, concerts in wooden churches among the trees. They enter Philharmonic Hall. The audience is hushed. They are seated, the program is in their laps. To listen to a symphony is to open the book of faces. The maestro arrives. He collects himself, stands poised. The great, exotic opening chords of Chabrier. They go to performances of Swan Lake, their faces pale in the darkness of the Grand Tier. The vast curve of seats is lighted like the Ritz. A huge orchestra pit, big as a ship, a ceiling of gold, hung with bursts of light, with pendants that glitter like ice. The great Nureyev comes out after, bowing like an angel, like a prince. They beg each other for the glasses; his neck, his chest are gleaming with sweat, even the ends of his hair. His hands, like those of a child, play with the cape tassels. The end of performances, the end of Mozart, of Bach. The solo violinist stands with her face raised, utterly drained, the last chords still sounding, as if from a great love. The conductor applauds her, the audience, the beautiful women, their hands held high.

They pass their life together, they pass boys fishing, walking to the end of the pier with a small eel tied, doubled up, on the hook. The mute eye of the eel calls out, a black dot in his plain, silver face. They sit at the table where their grandfather eats, Nedra’s father, a salesman, a man from small towns, his cough yellow, the Camel cigarettes always near his hand. His voice is out of focus, his eyes are filmed, he hardly seems to notice them. He brings death with him into the kitchen; a long, wasted life, the chrysalis of Nedra’s, its dry covering, its forgotten source. He has cheap shoes, a suitcase filled with samples of aluminum window frames.

Their life is formed together, woven together, they are like actors, a group of devoted actors who know nothing beyond themselves, beyond the pile of roles from old, from immortal plays.

The summer ends. There are misty, chilly days, the sea is quiet and white. The waves break far out with a slow, majestic sound. The beach is deserted. Occasional strollers along the water’s edge. The children lie on Viri’s back like possums; the sand is warm beneath him.

Peter and Catherine join them, together with their little boy. The families sit separated, in the solitude and mist. Peter has a folding chair and wears a yachting cap and a shirt. Beside him is a bucket filled with ice, bottles of Dubonnet and rum. An eerie and beautiful day. The fine points of mist drift over them. August has passed.

At a pause in the conversation, Peter rises and walks slowly, without a word, into the sea, a solitary bather, swimming far out in his blue shirt. His strokes are powerful and even. He swims with assurance, strong as an iceman. Finally Viri joins him. The water is cool. There is mist all about them, the swelling rhythm of the waves. No one is in sight except their families sitting on shore.

“It’s like swimming in the Irish Sea,” Peter says. “Never any sun.”

Franca and Danny come out to them.

“It’s deep here,” Viri warns.

Each of the men holds a child. They huddle close.

“The Irish sailors,” Peter tells them, “never learn to swim. Not even a stroke. The sea is too strong.”

“But what if the boat sinks?”

“They cross their hands on their chests and say a prayer,” Peter says. He performs it. Like the carved lid of a coffin he sinks from sight.

“Is it true?” they ask Viri later.

“Yes.”

“They drown?”

“They deliver themselves to God.”

“How does he know that?”

“He knows.”

“Peter is very strange,” Franca says.

And he reads to them, as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning the earth at their feet. There are stories he has never heard of, and others he has known as a child, these stepping stones that are there for everyone. What is the real meaning of these stories, he wonders, of creatures that no longer exist even in the imagination princes, woodcutters, honest fishermen who live in hovels. He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance. He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour, and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognize it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it. Instead, in his even, sensuous voice he laves them in the petty myths of Europe, of snowy Russia, the East. The best education comes from knowing only one book, he tells Nedra. Purity comes from that, and proportion, and the comfort of always having an example close at hand.

“Which book?” she says.

“There are a number of them.”

“Viri,” she says, “it’s a charming idea.”

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1 Response to The Books: “Light Years” (James Salter)

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