I’ve been reading Light Years by James Salter for my all-male book club –– all male, that is, except for me, a woman.
This gendered breakdown was unintentional and feels strangely countercultural; book clubs, the media would have us believe, are for the gals (although what were nine-ish centuries of academia if not an all-male book club?).
I recently found myself among a group of men extolling the Book Club movie series at a margarita party (“The one with Candice Bergen?” “Yes, and Mary Steeeeeenburgen.”)
I’m pleased to say our book club has been going great, and one of our members even brought snacks to our last meeting. Everyone likes snacks, but in my experience men don’t always remember to bring them.
I’m happy to be reading Light Years in part because I suggested it for our ranked-choice voting system. Really, I wanted to read anything by James Salter, having heard what great things he did for the sentence.
“It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today,” wrote Richard Ford in his 1995 introduction to Light Years. American sentences! Better than anybody? I was enticed.
When we settled on Salter, our options were A Sport and a Pastime, his break-out novel, and Light Years, widely considered his masterpiece. I told the group what I knew of both –– that one was apparently very sexy and the other very sad:
When it came down to it, I chose Light Years, with the consolation that Elizabeth Benedict of The Philadelphia Inquirer blurbed it as “...unabashedly sexual, sensual,” as well as “profoundly sad.”
Besides, I’d been wanting to read Light Years since it was recommended in a Substack post by
, whose writing I enjoy. (Recently the New York Post ran a story about Cai getting booted from a federal jury because she tweeted about one of the FBI agents being hot. A scary thought: which publicly accessible photos would the Post use to humiliate you?)100 pages into Light Years, I can confirm that Salter works wonders on the humble unit of the sentence. I’ve never seen someone deploy a more gutting semicolon, or for that matter, simile. When introducing a character, he probes their whole person, from heart to fingernails, turning them inside out, then tacking on a final devastating detail, like the scent of their breath (“faintly bad like the breath of an uncle who is no longer well”) or the flash of their eyes (“black, lustrous, with the long, crazy lashes of a drunken woman.”) The eyelash description is actually about a pony named Ursula, which makes it even better.
Salter’s characters all have fantastic, vowel-heavy names that require a breathy mental pronunciation: Nedra, Niiva, Viri, Kaya.
I’ll save my other observations for official book club, but I’m bracing myself for Salter to rupture some beautiful people’s lives.
I’m so engrossed that I even took to reading while standing on the subway last night. As much as I’d love to be a regular subway reader, I’m usually thwarted by the urgent need to stare at people.
I’m glad, though, that I glanced up to watch a little girl in a school uniform perform some kind of worship song to herself. She clasped her hands in prayer and then unfurled them in praise, eyes intently upward as if she could see sky.