The Many Meanings Of Light: Light Years by James Salter (1975).

James Salter is sometimes called a writer’s writer.  Critics adored him; the public was far less enthralled.  Born James Horowitz, Salter attended West Point and became a major in the Air Force.  He flew more than 100 combat missions during the Korean War and mined that experience to write The Hunters, which became a movie starring Robert Mitchum.  Horowitz adopted Salter as a pen name to hide his writing from the military, but then dumped Horowitz permanently when he got the chance because he didn’t want to be  “another Jewish writer from New York,”  according to his obituary in The New York Times. Light Years offers no evidence that anyone would ever confuse Horowitz/Salter with Phillip Roth, although I guess Roth technically sprung from New Jersey.  Can he be rated with Cheever and Updike? I can’t say, but my hunch is that the name change merely doomed him to becoming just another Christian writer from New York.

Light has many meanings and many properties.  It is the absence of dark.  It is luminosity.  It is the lack of heft.  It is triviality and frivolousness.  It conjures impossible speed.  It moves in a steady stream or in flashes like bolts of lightening.

Light appears in all these ways in Light Years.  Salter’s prose is incandescent–beautiful, chiseled, without an extraneous word.  He writes impressionistically.  He provides flashes of the lead characters’ interior and exterior lives.  The whole though is far less than the sum of these fragments.   These are little lives, superficial and pretentious. The lives speed by impressionistically but they leave little impression.

Light Years is about the demise of a marriage.  In the first chapter, we meet Nedra and Viri Berland and their young daughters, Franca and Danny.  They live along the Hudson River Valley  Viri is an architect.  Nedra is striking.  They entertain their friends with dinner parties, and their friends entertain them with dinner parties.  They eat at restaurants.  They attend avant garde theater.  They summer in Amagansett.  Nedra shops in Manhattan at Zabar’s and Bonwit’s. Viri purchases bespoke monogrammed shirts.  They have matching affairs.

There is no tension between Viri and Nedra apart from one overarching one.  Viri is too small for Nedra.  Viri initially craves fame, but his is a “minor talent.”  He will not design an enduring structure. He is a good father, which is a euphemism for “ineffective” man. Nedra wants more, especially money,  but whether it’s fame, excitement, or self-fulfillment, her yearnings remain vague.  What she fears most are the words “ordinary life.” She and Salter though utter some of the best lines about a marriage that has lost its spark I’ve ever encountered.  At one point Nedra confesses, “There are things I love about marriage. I love the familiarity of it. It’s like a tattoo.  You wanted it at the time, you have it, it’s implanted in your skin, you can’t get rid of it.” As things decline, her thoughts become more dismal, “It’s what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can’t do and what you must do.”

Viri and Nedra divorce. She flits around the watering spots in Europe, auditions for acting school but is judged too old, has an affair with an actor, and takes a house in Amagansett.  Viri joins an architectural firm in Italy and marries an Italian woman, basically because she wants him to and he lacks the backbone to break away.

Viri comes to think that he has squandered his life and thought too small, “When all was said, he had wanted one thing, it was far too small: he had wanted them [his kids] to grow up in the happiest of homes.”  Nedra, afflicted with a fatal illness, comes to think that she hasn’t appreciated enough the smaller things, like the love of her children.  Both hope their children get closer to what has eluded them both.  Viri muses, “Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed.  Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own.  Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit.”  Nedra commands Franca to “go further” with her life “than I did.”

At the end of the novel, Viri returns to visit the old family home in the Hudson Valley.  He stands at the river’s edge.  Time has erased the traces of his family life– the children hiding in the woods, playing in the snow, building a fort, lying in the flowers, romping with the dog.   “Those afternoons that would never vanish, all ended.  He, resettled.  His daughters, gone.” His flashbacks underscore that his life has been lived in a flash.  “It happens in an instant.  It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.”

The Berlands aren’t likeable characters although they’re not dislikeable either.  Nothing in their lives seems to leave a scratch–the death of Nedra’s father, untimely deaths of two local children, the mugging of a friend, the painful death of another friend.  The events occur in the 1960’s and 1970’s and there’s no mention of civil rights or Vietnam or protests or riots or Watergate.  Marvelous writing does not compensate for a scanty plot and superficial,  self-absorbed characters.  Life is fleeting, but it is more meaningful when you focus on people and causes other than yourself.

Light Years is a lightweight novel about lightweight people.  It appeared on some lists of novels to read during lock down.  It didn’t deserve a second chance.