All That Is by James Salter

Published by Knopf on April 2, 2013 

All That Is records the chapters of Philip Bowman’s life, from his service in the Pacific Fleet during World War II through his eventual employment as a book editor and his troubled marriage to Vivian Amussen, whose father -- a southern gentleman from Virginia -- isn’t sure that Bowman has the right breeding to merit his daughter’s hand.  Later Bowman is “in the middle of life and just beginning.”  Still later he finds his past repeating.  The novel ends before Bowman’s life does, leaving it to the reader to decide what will happen next, what his fate will be.  Along the way we meet Bowman’s friends and lovers, his boss, his relatives and in-laws.

James Salter often sums up minor characters in a few brisk sentences.  One of the novel’s few faults, in fact, is the abundance of interesting characters.  Other than Bowman’s friend Neil Eddins, whose life is recounted in bits and pieces, characters appear and then vanish, perhaps reappearing for a moment before vanishing again.  People come and go from our lives and that’s certainly true in Bowman’s case, but the disappearances are frustrating.  I felt as if I had met a number of interesting people, only to be disappointed that I had no chance to know them better.  On the other hand, I felt I knew Bowman intimately -- knew him, understood him, shared his disappointments and triumphs.

Death and betrayal and the growth and failure of love are recurring themes.  The novel is a bit meandering because that’s the flow of Bowman’s life.  All That Is endeavors to tell the story of a life, and lives are often filled with unexciting moments.  Some of the novel’s scenes are uneventful, the sort of things from our own lives that we remember for no particular reason -- a thunderstorm, a quiet lunch.  Sometimes the characters are mere observers, noting changes and trends as America transitions from war to peace to protest (Eddins refers to the rise of feminism, for instance, as “the woman thing”).  Salter’s nuanced prose prevents the novel from becoming dull even during lulls in the life that is the novel’s subject.  From time to time, something surprising happens to Bowman, and a couple of times his behavior is shocking.  Those are the moments that give the novel its life.

In many respects, Bowman is a man after my own heart.  “He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions.  He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure.”   Bowman’s love of books gives him an excuse to share his opinions about Ezra Pound, Lord Byron, Thomas Hardy, and modern American poets, whose success is “the result of intense self-promotion, flattery, and mutual agreements.”  Bowman experiences and comments upon the evolution (devolution?) of publishing in modern America.

At some point Bowman tells Vivian about his love for one of Hemingway’s stories.  At times, Salter’s writing style is Hemingwayesque:  paragraphs are built from direct, punchy, heartfelt sentences.  Scenes of war are depicted in taut, piercing prose.  At other times -- when, for instance, he describes the impact of war on a shattered England, a victory with the taste of defeat -- his sentences are serpentine, capturing one vivid image after another.  He writes about passion with a staccato rhythm while romance is captured in languid language.  His descriptions of pain are acute -- most prominently, the agony of lost love (“How did it happen, that something no longer mattered, that it had been judged inessential?”).

Eddins looks “at his life as a story -- the real part was something he’d left behind.”  How much of our lives are real?  How much have we really lived?  The questions Salter poses in All That Is invite the reader to think about how much of life matters.  The good days?  The lonely nights?  The thunderstorms?  The answer, I think, lies in the title.

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