Light Years is made up of glimpses, half-scenes, reveries, snatches of talk. It describes impressionistically the dissolution, over two decades, of a once happy marriage. The husband, Viri Berland, is an architect, sufficiently prosperous and not untalented, but never able to fulfil his higher professional ambitions. Nedra, his wife, is beautiful, “interesting”, a woman of taste. For some years they create together a secure life for themselves and their two daughters, a life of pets, excursions, stories, games, endless summer holidays. But temperamentally they are too dissimilar: they begin to drift apart. Each takes a lover. Viri is essentially a mild man, eager to keep the marriage together for the sake of the children, or even for its own sake, for wholeness. Nedra feels obliged to seek freedom, to explore her own individuality. Eventually they divorce and go their different ways: Viri to a doubtful second marriage, Nedra to a succession of experiments and affairs. As they enter middle age the question is how far the memories and experiences of the happier years can sustain them in the face of loneliness, illness or even death.
Odd transitions, unexpected emphases and omissions, and especially the cumulative effect of many passages of rapt description convey a dream-like sense of the passing of time, the shift of relationships, the growing-up of children. James Salter creates a languorous atmosphere in which motives, aims and needs seem uncertain, and patterns of living establish themselves unperceived. By the standards it sets itself, however, Light Years is less than fully successful. The author works too hard to sustain the dominant mood. Too many of the descriptive passages are a little overwritten, a little too self-conscious. The short sentences can seem mannered, the similes obtrusive. Hyperbole comes too easily: repeatedly characters are “overwhelmed” or “stunned”.
The very scheme of the book involves a calculated risk. So much is to be left out:
Life is weather. Life is meals. Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.
Life is these things, of course, but it is a great many other things besides, most of them less obviously picturesque. The pattern of the novel demands that the characters are almost invariably seen in an aesthetically interesting context. As a result they and their doings come to seem insubstantial. Work and the workaday are inconspicuous and a conventional notion of Good Living bulks far too large. Viri and Nedra spend too much of their time sipping Margaux or St Raphael or retsina or ouzo or Rémy Martin and talking lightly of Mahler or Céline or Europe or Nureyev or India. It is not easy to take their agonies or their ecstasies as seriously as the author invites us to. Light Years is a graceful novel but neither in style nor material is it sufficiently vital to lend power to the author’s larger comments on life and death.
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