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Light Years, by James Salter
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This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness - and then felt compelled to destroy it.
- Sales Rank: #42548 in Audible
- Published on: 2014-01-10
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 618 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
108 of 120 people found the following review helpful.
Courage
By taking a rest
The courage to live life as it changes, as the faults that went unseen in the initial rush of novelty emerge, to adapt, continue and be happy, content, this I believe is the heart of this work. The small imperfections that erode to fatal flaws as the years pass, the union of marriage that grows old, and regret and a desire for something new becomes an obsession. And if the freedom is regained can it ever be as it was anticipated. How can anything desired for years, embellished and romanticized for decades ever deliver contentment?
The marriage of Nedra and Viri act more like a parenthetical that contains the entire novel and its events, than they serve as the focal point. The dozens of friends on almost as many levels of intimacy all revolve around the married couple, the former couple, or the individuals they believe they become for a second time. Is contentment the equivalent of stagnation; is it predestined for most, or voluntary for the few?
Mr. Salter continues in, "Light Years", what he has done in all 3 of the novels I have read thus far. The people he creates transcend whatever story he presents them in. The personalities he creates are wonderful not because they entertain with their uniqueness or their contrived eccentricities, but because of how normal they are, or perhaps familiar. This is not to suggest they are clich�, they are everything but that, they are people you know, people you may meet, or a character that you find a part of you is within.
One of the beauties of what this man is capable of with his writing is reaching very deeply into the thoughts and fears that inhabit almost all of us. He does not presume, he does not judge or lecture, he just lets you look through your minds eye, and decide for yourself. There are the affairs, but even when the most intimate of acts takes place he handles it in a manner that is clear, pure, evocative, but never does he stoop to the profane. His treatment of the females he writes about is done with respect; he does not objectify the women he writes of even if they seem to offer themselves in a manner that would justify the word object. Males and females are flawed, they err, and they can seek answers and redemption, and again he lets you decide, he does not hand down Judgement.
This is an amazing writer that I either missed, or many have, as his is some of the best work I have ever read. Comparisons are really unnecessary, take what you like about your favorite writers, and you will find something to love in this man's work.
52 of 56 people found the following review helpful.
One of the Great Novels of the 20th Century
By Eric Treanor
I can still remember a time when drinking was an unmitigated delight. Rightly or wrongly, I felt freed by it of my worst qualities: humorlessness, abject obedience to authority, a fascination with judgment, morbid self-control.
Drinking, I became less narrow. I became, for myself, finally, unpredictable. At the age of twenty-nine, I had found a path into the open meadow, or the great teeming city, of life.
Let me put that another way: suddenly, for the first time, I was having fun being an adult.
It was around that time that I read Under the Volcano. I loved the book and I liked to read passages from it aloud.
But I didn't understand it. In addition to its exotic locale, it described an exotic experience: alcohol as an act of suicide. Alcohol as a flight not to life but from it.
If I were to read Under the Volcano today, it would not be the same book. (Re-read books are never the same, which is why there is no such thing as re-reading.) Lowry would now be describing an experience that has become a possibility, perhaps even an inevitability--an experience that, however faintly (or probably not very faintly) I now recognize.
So too does Light Years, by James Salter, a book I've just finished and which has shaken me as few works of art ever have.
Its account of the beauty of marriage, and of its pleasures, and of its terrible and insidious forms of loneliness, would have once been incomprehensible to me. I suppose I would have recognized--but without nostalgia, which makes recognition matter--its account of marriage as a form of refuge. And as a sight of sudden, permanent moments of beauty. But I wouldn't have recognized its account of marriage as catastrophically, terribly lonely, and as always, at some level, doomed.
So I would not have understood the book, as I could not understand Under the Volcano.
I'm saying that I would have loved Light Years, as I loved Under the Volcano, but I would have experienced its primary theme, its motivating truth, as exotic, charming, and irrelevant.
I think that Light Years can't be wholly felt unless the reader has been married and a parent for a while--probably for years. That fact (and I believe it's a fact) might explain the book's otherwise inexcusable lack of fame.
(There is no corresponding excuse for the neglect of Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, which is one of very few post-war American masterpieces of erotica--are there any others?--and which, like all of Salter's work, continues to be suspiciously un-read.)
Light Years describes with unsurpassed delicacy the mysteries of domestic suburban married life. It gives a heartwrenching account of parenthood--as heartwrenching (by which I mean true) as any I know. This book could not have been written by a person who did not love marriage and parenthood and who had not known great happiness as a husband and a father.
But also great unhappiness; and it's always in unhappiness, as Tolstoy famously noted, where the story lies.
I don't feel inclined to summarize the plot. Its basic elements are relatively predictable, as all plots are, or eventually become, for anyone who passes his or her life among novels. The details of plot don't matter, anyway--not in this book, not ever. What matters in literature are formal accomplishment, stylistic strangeness, and honesty.
Light Years possesses all three of those qualities in abundance. Reading it, I often had to stop after a few pages, as if to re-assemble myself. The novel seemed to be--it was--smashing me into pieces. It often left me breathless. I confess that as the novel drew to a close (although I did not love its final pages) I wept bitterly.
Salter has divided Light Years into five parts, each built around what he frames as discreet stages of adult married life. Passing through each stage, one recognizes their truthfulness. More generally, one recognizes that there is great cruelty in truth. That we recognize truth by its cruelty.
The book's celebration of the basic pleasures of life acquires as it a proceeds a kind of indisputable force. No American writer since Hemingway evokes the pleasures of food and drink, the experience of preparing food and eating it, as exquisitely as Salter. In fact, his evocations are better than Hemingway's. (No doubt it's no coincidence that both men spent a great deal of time in France.)
Salter is equally gifted at using setting to construct the emotional content of his art. His eye for the nuance and significance of light is unparalleled in modern American literature, perhaps in all of American literature.
My copy of the book was published by North Point Press and has on its cover a painting by Pierre Bonnard. This choice seems exactly right. Both Salter and Bonnard present the truth--the truth as I've experienced it, anyway--of domestic life: They see its colors, its light, its stillness, its sadness and joy, its tendency to dissolve into something which cannot be thought about and so cannot be contained.
One realizes reading Salter that of course all politics are local because all life is local. We can't feel beyond ourselves. And what causes us to feel? Landscape, weather, nearby bodies, other animals, physical activity, the voices and the words of those we love, human--especially female--beauty, wit, the intelligence and dignity of children. Food and drink. Now and then, too rarely, a work of art. And the sanctuaries of sleep and bedding and the bewilderment of beloved flesh in close proximity to our own. The bewilderment of touch and scent. The boundless province of sex and its indigenous despair.
It is a book about aging and the primary act of resistance we have against aging, which is falling in love.
We see, if we are ready, that beyond those things nothing else matters. The rest is not silence but noise.
I suspect this book will be impossible to read if you don't understand that women are real and have emotional lives that are completely, permanently their own.
Which might make it impossible for most men to read and probably explains why I found reading it so difficult and why it is generally, unjustly unknown.
I think Light Years is one of the great American novels of the 20th century and I'll read it again when I have the strength to face it.
37 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
If you want to know what "luminous" means....
By headbutler
The main characters are named Viri and Nedra, and Lord knows that signals "pretentious." Ignore all that. No one writes about what happens between men and women better than Salter; you can see your own relationships in the 308 pages it takes to track the glory and fall of this marriage between an architect and his thin, troubled wife. And the sense of place! Here he is on the lure the Hamptons held for Nedra: "She was a creature of blue, flawless days, the sun of their noons hot as the African coast, the chill of the nights immense and clear." I started the book in that place on a morning so grey the sky and ocean merged; I read through the rain; I finished at night. A day well spent.
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