All That Is

By James Salter, 2013, Alfred A. Knopf, 290 pages
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, Nov. 9, 2020

For the sake of accuracy, I would add one word at the end of the title: “Pretentious.”

I refuse to waste much of my time, energy and words on this novel about the person who I am certain is fiction’s most boring veteran of World War II.

Post-war, Philip Bowman, a junior U.S. Navy officer who saw action in the South Pacific, gets a Harvard degree, goes to work for an intimate, prestigious New York book-publishing house, marries a beautiful woman who eventually dumps him, has brief conversations with other beautiful women who almost immediately sleep with him, loses one woman to a real-estate scam then sleeps with her beautiful daughter, and the novel ends, nearly 300 pages too late.

Damn. I spent a lot more effort describing this pointless story than I intended. Cross off a bunch of the above clauses, get rid of all 3- and 4-syllable words, and you still have a better summary than it deserves.

Am I bitter because Philip Bowman and I have some similarities, and he’s the one who ended up with a lofty Manhattan career?

Well, let’s think about this: He and I were both junior officers in the Navy. We both married well (although my beautiful wife hasn’t dumped me yet). And, like him, I have had brief conversations with other beautiful women.

But wait: I actually lived a life, and he is (bleepin’) fictional. I had no choice, I had to put up with the usual boring stuff – mowing the lawn, flossing – but he didn’t. He had an author who could have made him exciting, thrilling even; instead, James Salter turned Philip Bowman into a pretentious glob of lite mayonnaise.

(My globness was legitimately earned.)

Salter lards the book with obscure allusions to authors, to books, to works of art. The allusions were so obscure, I couldn’t tell which ones were real and which made-up, so I didn’t know when to be offended for my ignorance.

You want pretentious? (Don’t answer that; you’re going to get it.) Here’s a sex scene, and if it’s a little overdone, don’t worry: The two people in it aren’t even characters who make much of a difference plot-wise:

They came home late, she on his arm, long-legged and unsteady, head down as she walked, as if from drinking. In bed he lay spent, like a soldier at the end of leave, and she was riding him like a horse, her hair blinding her. He loved everything, her small navel, her loose, dark hair, her feet with their long, naked toes in the morning. Her buttocks were glorious, it was like being in a bakery, and when she cried out it was like a dying woman, one that had crawled to a shrine.

Hey lady: It’s a bakery. No shorts, no shoes, no service.

In 290 pages, readers meet a lot of people. Lots. I thought I would be able to criticize Salter by pointing out that some of them had no role in advancing the plot, but by the time I got to the end, I realized that didn’t matter, that there was no plot. And that is the ultimate in pretentiousness, when an author sends the message: “Hey dumbo reader, if you cannot connect all these unrelated dots, you are not smart enough, hip enough or educated enough to understand my art. Where’d you get your degree, some mail-order joint in darkest Nebraska?”

Um, ahem, no. It was the University of Nebraska. Where it’s light.

Are any of you so shallow that you read books with the hope of uncovering typos and grammatical blunders? Come on, I can’t be the only one. Twice (at least; I did stop counting), the author used “different than”; “different from” would have been correct. Once (again, could have been more), he used “it’s” where he meant “its.” And I couldn’t pass up this sentence: It was a bluish day with clouds shaped like smoke. Yeah, that shape of “smoke,” it’s so damned distinctive.

When you’re showing off, even when you’re so profoundly pretentious that you’re convinced you’re not the least bit pretentious, it makes sense to have a good copy editor. And, just for the record, there’s this in the front of the book: “Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.”

Of New York.