3.5
Light Years
ByPublisher Description
A brilliant portrait of a marriage from the PEN/Faulkner Award-winner and author of A Sport and a Pastime, with an introduction by Richard Ford.
“Light Years is a novel of almost holy radiance to me. It is great in every sense of the word: vast, and timeless, and enduring.”—Lauren Groff, bestselling author of Fates and Furies
“Remarkable. An unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time.”—James Wolcott, Esquire
“[A] twentieth-century masterpiece. At once iridescent, lyrical, mystical and magnetic.”—Bloomsbury Review
Nedra and Viri's favored life revolves around delightful dinners, imaginative games with their children, enviable friends, and idyllic days spent skating on a frozen river or basking in the sun on the beach. But even as Salter lingers over the surface of their marriage, he 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.
“Light Years is a novel of almost holy radiance to me. It is great in every sense of the word: vast, and timeless, and enduring.”—Lauren Groff, bestselling author of Fates and Furies
“Remarkable. An unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time.”—James Wolcott, Esquire
“[A] twentieth-century masterpiece. At once iridescent, lyrical, mystical and magnetic.”—Bloomsbury Review
Nedra and Viri's favored life revolves around delightful dinners, imaginative games with their children, enviable friends, and idyllic days spent skating on a frozen river or basking in the sun on the beach. But even as Salter lingers over the surface of their marriage, he 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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesLight Years Reviews
3.5
“Very poetic, it was a velvety and rich read. But sometimes you can only have so much richness before you tire and need a break.”
“I held out for as long as I could with Light Years. Technically, this is a DNF, though I read over half the book and then skipped to the final pages to understand where it landed. I tried to give it grace. I am not new to racism in literature. I read a lot of classics and understand historical context, though I don’t believe “the times” excuse cruelty or laziness. I tend to be more forgiving with books written in the 1800s or early 1900s. I am not forgiving of books written after the civil rights era. Light Years was published in 1995. That matters.
The novel follows Viri and Nedra, a married couple living a polished, affluent life in upstate New York. Viri is an architect, they host dinner parties, and from the outside, everything appears enviable. The book drifts through decades of their marriage, from their late twenties into old age, beginning in the late 1950s and ending sometime in the 1980s. There is no real plot. The chapters are fleeting, impressionistic moments that loosely connect, hovering over the slow rot of an unhappy marriage. The language is lush and pretty, but distant. For a while, I wasn’t sure whether the racist remarks scattered throughout were meant to reflect the characters or the era. I highlighted each instance, trying to give the book the benefit of the doubt.
Eventually, it became clear that these were not simply characters with flaws. These were authorial choices. There is a scene where a character is brutally beaten by two Black men, with their race unnecessarily emphasized and described in a way that leans into old, ugly tropes. There are repeated racist stereotypes about Jewish people. There is also a scene involving a Chinese restaurant written with a caricatured, mocking accent. None of these moments serve the story. They are not interrogated. They are not contextualized. They simply exist on the page. The misogyny threaded throughout the novel is just as blatant. These are not neutral observations of flawed people. They are patterns.
I know James Salter is often called a writer’s writer. He can write, clearly. His prose is competent and sometimes elegant, but I did not find it exceptional. I did not find myself lingering over lines or wanting to underline much of anything. I have read better writing in older classics and better writing from his contemporaries, including Toni Morrison, who writes with far more precision, depth, and moral clarity. I am allowed to choose what I engage with. I choose not to spend time with books where racism or misogyny bleed so plainly through the author’s voice. So I stopped. That is my review.”
About James Salter
James Salter authored numerous books, including the novels All That Is, Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), and The Hunters; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; the collections Dusk and Other Stories, which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Last Night, which won the Rea Award for the Short Story and the PEN/Malamud Award; and Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days, written with his wife, Kay Salter. He died in 2015.
Other books by James Salter
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