James Salter, All That Is (Picador)
This book was so overwhelmingly well received by its reviewer in The Times that it ddn't seem like an option not to get a copy and read it. Some such recommendations are essential signposts and I will rarely be more grateful for a newspaper notice than the one in the same paper about a decade ago that directed me to Richard Yates before the revival of his reputation.
Philip Bowman survives the Battle of Okinawa and returns home with little experience of women but into a career in publishing. He marries his first proper girlfriend somewhat gratefully and finds intimacy with her to be of monumental significance. But, eventually, his wife has to suggest that they don't have much in common and they are divorced. Subsequently Bowman has further relationships and each time it is apparently dependent on the physical part of it rather than emotional.
Throughout the story, he meets any number of contacts in the industry and as the novel becomes episodic, their back stories are filled in and the men all seem to feel the same way and so one is tempted to deduce that this is not specific to Bowman but applies to Salter, possibly to all American men and, perhaps in Salter's view, to all men,
The great humger of the past was for food, there was never enough food and the majority of people were undernourished or starving, but the new hunger was for sex, there was the same specter of famine without it.
It is not that there is any fault with the writing but, at about halfway I was beginning to wonder if any more was going to happen than this ongoing catalogue of obsession with a transcendental new toy that so often lost its lustre before its adherents went their separate ways to new alliances. Perhaps it is an analysis of the mores of the post-war world, from 1945 to the 1980's. Since the book was so readily lauded and has blurbs by an impressive cast of John Banville, Edmund White and Julian Barnes, I can only assume that there was some truth contained in these accumulated episodes that linked together to tell of a higher truth about 'all that is' that passed me by because although it was not a hardship to sit and read it, it still seemed inconsequential by the time I reached the end.
The penultimate page sweeps up a summary of the life looked back on, like the life flashing back as it is said to do as one dies, but Bowman is not apparently dying, only planning a trip to Venice. It reads like an attempt to recreate the consummate ending to The Dead by Joyce but it is no more than a mildly lyrical synopsis of what we have just read.
And so, I was left at a loss to see what had made the book so great for several readers whose qualifications to appreciate it are all so much finer than mine. I knew from the start that it was going to need to be good because it followed on from my re-reading of McEwan's Sweet Tooth, which is a masterpiece if ever I read one, and so it had a job on but, with the sort of billing it had, it had seemed as if it might be up to the challenge.
You can't win them all. If it's me that has missed the point it is my loss entirely.
