Every Part Strengthens a Part

I first read Light Years when I was eighteen, which is about the perfect age to read it. From the ages of thirteen to seventeen I was unbearably precocious and refused to read anything but the gloomiest and most obscure translated novels. I didn’t get much enjoyment out of these lugubrious books but stubbornly persisted in trudging through Witold Gombrowicz’s complete works, or Nathalie Sarraute’s slim, confounding novels, convinced that my difficult reading habits demonstrated the seriousness of my character. So when I first read Light Years, during a year abroad in East Africa, it came as a great relief to me. Here was a novel that described adults like my mother and father, who lived in places familiar to me, who acted in the mysterious, pragmatic way adults did, and whose American lives, filled with food and wine and pets and holidays and beautiful objects, bore a general resemblance to my own. And Salter’s prose – limpid, strong and shapely – was a revelation. That you could write like this, in simple, direct sentences that told you what they meant while often hinting at something more, astonished me. Immediately, my own writing improved.

It’s funny that a kid from suburban Massachusetts should have waited so long to find himself and his family represented in literature. Most novels published in English each year have to do with families, often families who live in the suburbs, where they worry about money, college acceptances and how to keep a marriage happy. Why hadn’t I picked up Updike or Cheever or Carver, or Ann Beattie or Richard Ford or Lorrie Moore? I’m not sure. I purposefully walked past them at the library and went straight for The Obscene Bird of Night, a novel by the Chilean writer Jose Donoso that I diligently applied myself to and did not understand a word of.

Funny too, that I read Light Years, a very American novel, while far away from America. I read it for the first time in an oasis town called Loiyangalani, in the north of Kenya. I was in Kenya for a year between high school and college and arrived there by what seemed a marvelous accident. I wasn’t keen on going to college. Something about it seemed wrong. My mother insisted. A compromise was reached: I would go to Kenya, where my aunt had a friend who lived on a large farm. I could earn my keep working for him, travel around the country as I saw fit, and return to America in a year’s time, wiser and more worldly, ready to join my peers at a liberal arts college in the northeast. I was enthusiastic about this. In June I left, with Light Years, packed at the last moment, snug in my bag. It stayed there with its pages yellowing for five months until I found myself in Loiyangalani. It’s a severe place surrounded by vast black plains of volcanic rock on the shores of an enormous saline lake. After I’d had some fried lake fish and played pool at a bar, I realized it was too hot to sleep – the mercury wouldn’t fall below 100 until midnight – so I read all night under a dim bulb, sweat falling off my forehead to curdle the pages.

That year I read Light Years again and again. It accompanied me as I moved around Kenya: From the central highlands, where I first got a foothold in the country, to the north, to Loiyangalani and beyond. I lived with a missionary from Northern Ireland for a while, a devout, tireless man. In the evening, while he read the Bible or back issues of Christianity Today, I reread my favorite passages from Light Years. I left him after a month and hitchhiked to the Ethiopian border, sitting in a truck’s cramped cab for ten or fourteen hours a day, smoking pot, and having braindead conversations with the drivers. I got tired of the desert and went south and then east to the coast: Mombasa, Kilifi, Watamu, Malindi – towns on the sea, their three-syllable names dancing off my tongue. My Kiswahili got better, more refined. I found a room and stayed in Lamu, an island not far from the Somali border, for two months. I unpacked my bags and put Light Years on a shelf next to my diary and my copy of Lonely Planet: Kenya.

Truthfully, Light Years had nothing to do with where I was or what I was doing. Salter’s novel is about Nedra and Viri, an intelligent, vain, selfish couple and their children, Danny and Franca. It takes place in New York City and the Hudson Valley and a few select parts of Europe. The couple grow older, they have affairs, they separate, their children become adults and begin lives of their own. Characters speak in sad, meandering dialogue that seemed to hint at adult meanings I couldn’t yet grasp. “You know what they say about chicken?” One asks Nedra. “Every part strengthens a part.”

Salter’s great subject is life – the hidden life, a wasted life, the right life and the wrong life – and just as Lonely Planet was my guide to Kenya, directing me to a cheap room or a quick bite, I started to read Light Years as a guide to this new life, which was much stranger and more intoxicating than I had thought possible. The slow glimmering awareness that other people had private lives of their own, full of drama and tragedy, was a hypnotic idea to me. It meant that I too, was like them: I had a life, a thing that I had some control over. I could steer it in whatever direction I so pleased. I did so quite literally in Kenya: I wanted to go east? I went east. West? I went west. Across the border and down the Tanzanian coast? It was simply a matter of buying a bus ticket. That year, it felt like my life could be every bit as rich and potent and boundless as I might imagine. I felt like I was floating. But I had forgotten, somewhere in my traveling, what Salter says very plainly towards the end of Light Years: “One of the last great realizations,” he writes, “is that life will not be what you dreamed.”

Light Years turns fifty this year. James Salter was fifty when the novel was published, and he felt as if his life had ended. He had gone to West Point, like his father, and then joined the Air Force in 1945. He was stationed in Hawaii, Germany and France. He flew in Korea. The military, its rules and intense camaraderie, suited him. The personalities in it inspired him. In 1956 he published his first novel, The Hunters, a story about fighter pilots in the Korean War. The novel was adapted into a film starring Robert Mitchum and the money from that enabled Salter to write full-time. In 1957, after twelve years in the Air Force, he handed in his resignation. “It was the most difficult act of my life,” he writes in his memoir, Burning the Days.

But Salter survived his separation from the Air Force. He wrote a few novels and a couple screenplays, none of them particularly successful. Light Years, he decided, would be different. “I wanted glory,” he wrote, plain about his ambition. His new novel was to be grander and wiser; he intended it to summarize a few of his attitudes towards life. One of them, in Salter’s telling, was that “marriage lasted too long.” The other, more essential idea was that the only things that are important in life are those you remember.

What is remembered, in Light Years, are dinner parties, love affairs, houses rented for the summer in Amagansett, funerals, brief friendships, books read, plays attended, a film or two. It’s about the Berlands, Nedra and Viri, and their children, Danny and Franca, who live in a roomy old house in the Hudson Valley. Viri works as an architect in New York City. Nedra hosts sumptuous dinners and shops for her family at Zabar’s. Danny and Franca have a pony named Ursula. The Berlands are spoiled, rich, and slightly careless. It is their life, “a Russian life, a rich life, interwoven,” that is illuminated for us.

At night I walked barefoot down Lamu’s narrow streets. I thought about Nedra and Viri. I thought about Eve and Arnaud, another couple in the novel. I watched young European couples on holiday, wearing linen, stepping gingerly around piles of donkey shit. Slowly I was beginning to realize that the people I met while I traveled, some of whom were white, most of whom were black, lived and thought and acted differently than I did. I was eighteen – I think my frontal lobe was only just entering the first phase of its development – but it was the year that life began to reveal itself to me.

What I first loved about the book was Salter’s style, the simple, lyrical prose that became his calling card. I was used to convoluted sentences that crawled over multiple pages, comma after comma, leaving me breathless and haggard after a chapter. It seemed revolutionary to me to write of a winter’s day, as Salter does on Light Years’ first page, “The day is white as paper.” That night in Loiyangalani I read each of his sentences twice, savoring their ease. I still know some lines by heart: “The days were cut from a quarry that would never be emptied.” “In six years she would be forty. She saw it from a distance, like a reef, the whitened glimpse of danger.” How perfect, I thought later on, when I saw the long ragged reefs that run off the Kenyan coast. It’s just like Light Years.

I liked Salter’s authority, his casual, final pronouncements. I found them comforting. They were delivered with such tossed-off surety that I would read each twice, shivering a little with the pleasure of receiving such grown-up wisdom. Often, their true meaning eluded me: “Summer is the noontime of devoted families.” I liked the ring of it, but it didn’t quite line up with my experience. My family, I decided, lacked sufficient devotion. “Long sleepers are usually nonconformists; they are pensive and somewhat withdrawn.” I, who found it impossible to sleep past eight in the morning, absorbed this line mournfully, resigning myself to my sad fate as a conformist.

But there were other lines, Salter’s famous lines. There are the ones I remember for their ingenuity and then there are the ones I absorbed as Gospel, the ones that seemed true and wise. Almost all of them have to do with life – how to construct it, how it becomes your own, how it erodes with time. It’s a sorrowful book, constantly reminding us that life has to end, that we’ll go, and the houses and the objects too. “‘I always just assumed the important things would stay somehow,” Nedra said. “But they don’t.’”

I recently reread Light Years, thinking I might write something for its fiftieth anniversary – some reflection on the novel, a little of the Salter legend, let my affection for the book bleed through – but I found myself more moved by it than I had anticipated. I remembered reading it three, four times in one year, the book at the top of my backpack, moving with me up and down East Africa. Reading it in Loiyangalani, that hot town with its suffering palm trees, and then reading it a month later on the coast, and then reading it again and again, in dim guesthouses and at bus stations and all throughout that long, lavish year.

What moved me at eighteen was not, however, what I found so affecting about the book now. At eighteen, I lingered over the details of the Berland’s house, their well-set table, their chatty, urbane lives. I loved their possessions, the material world that Salter so lovingly describes – “clear crystal dice, pieces of staghorn, amber beads, boxes, sculptures, wooden balls, magazines…” I didn’t care much for Viri and the chapters that had to do with him. I liked Nedra, whom I found so poised and intelligent, but didn’t understand her.

Now I see the novel more clearly. It’s not the work of genius that so captivated me at eighteen and nineteen: there are portentous bits (Viri’s Italian sojourn, towards the end of the novel, strikes me now as muddled and cloying) and quite a few wrong notes. The charges most frequently levied against Salter – that his sex scenes are ridiculous (“he came in one huge splash, like a tumbler of water”); that his women are thinly characterized; that he only writes about a rarefied upper-middle class world untouched by politics – now seemed reasonable, if forgivable. I put less stock in Salter’s magisterial judgements. I found myself gravitating towards other parts of Light Years. I decided that the book’s focus on the surface of things was less engrossing than I’d previously thought, but the parts of it that have to do with love and childrearing were better and more interesting to me now. Nedra’s death, in particular, seized me in a way it hadn’t when I was a teenager. Those chapters are among the best Salter ever wrote. I felt moved to tears reading about Nedra’s final months. “She had arrived at last,” he writes. “A calm had come over her, the calm of a great journey ended.”

I suppose I found myself most touched by the distance between the person I was when I first read Light Years and the one I am now. Or perhaps by the way the years have gone by and left their mark. “Life is contemptuous of knowledge,” Salter writes. It’s true. At eighteen, I felt that my life was finally beginning to expand outwards, like ripples in a pond, and would simply keep doing so, sort of endlessly.

I knew that I would go to school in upstate New York, near where I imagined Nedra and Viri lived. I didn’t know that I would fall in love for the first time there, only to be betrayed by a friend. I didn’t know that I would get caught at a party without a mask during Covid and have to leave school, bitter and ashamed of myself. I didn’t know that I would keep going back to Kenya, that I’d happily bankrupt myself every summer just to return, or that I would become obsessed with northern Kenya – the area around Loiyangalani – and eventually try to write about it, try semi-successfully and still be trying now. I didn’t know that my mom would divorce my father, a nasty process. I didn’t know that he would write letters to all their mutual friends denouncing my mom, alcoholic, thief, and then would show up in court representing himself, in the suit he wore every day and his soft suede shoes, determined to convince the judge what a horrible thing it was that she wanted to leave him. I didn’t know that she would move out into a small, airy apartment in the Boston neighborhood where I’d grown up, and then decide that she was done with the U.S.A. and with trying to prove herself to people, and moved, for good, to an old stone house on an island in Greece.

I didn’t know that my father would die, very stoically, very suddenly. Just five or six weeks after he went for a walk with a friend and by the end of it felt so feeble that he dragged himself to the emergency room. It was only the second time he’d been there in twenty years. The cancer must have been in you for years, the doctor told him. I didn’t know that he would die early one morning in a hospice, a few miles away from his room with his books and his objects – the ivory snuffbox, the Yemeni dagger, his silver cufflinks. When I reread Light Years earlier this spring and came to Nedra’s death, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking of him in the hospice, breathing very slowly and deeply, the thin hospital robe moving only very little above his chest. And at eighteen, so overjoyed with the new life that I was discovering day by day in East Africa, I didn’t know that almost ten years later I would be on the verge of leaving the U.S. again – going back to Africa but to the other side of the continent – and preparing to say goodbye to my friends, my family, and the girl I suddenly and unexpectedly fell in love with.

Knowledge of any of these events wouldn’t have protected me from them. On their own, they’re not special or particularly shocking. Taken together, they have power, they add up to something. “Life will not be what you dreamed,” Salter says, and he was right. But it will be yours.