Light Years

By: James Salter

Narrated by: Mark Boyett

Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter 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.

©1975 James Salter (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Captures the lives of 1960s New Yorkers

Only the central characters are fully formed. The rest are sketched on the periphery. They may make extended appearances, as the narrative wanders into their stories, but in the main thread comes back to Viri and Nedra. One feels their emotional perspectives keenly, and learns from them. Jhumpa Lahiri has a nice appreciation of this book on-line.

Beautiful story!

The characters are rich, the friends many, description of every day life of a family. The ending was sad.

Reading the Lives of Others

I like a well written book that moves lazily, unveiling lives of others in other places.
For me, this is perfect in every way.

Beautiful book and narration

Beautifully written. As good as a Sport and a Pastime, the book Salter believed was his best. This novel will break your heart. In a good way. I read that Salter’s writing style was baroque, out of fashion. Would it interest today’s readers? It should. You will not read better prose. It will touch you. Excellent narration by Mark Boyett.

A stunningly depressing, beautifully crafted novel

The writing is luminous, the plotting wonderful as it flits from scene to scene, season to season, but if there is a more depressing novel in print, I'd like to know what it is. Numbingly bleak. The outcome seemed an easy way out for an author shooting for profundity. I appreciated this book but did not enjoy a moment of it.

Not my favorite purchase, not my worse...

Story was well written, but it bore me at times. Wasn't excited to find out the end. It took me a while to finish.

English Major Fiction

“There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.”

James Salter, The Light Years

This is a book that is beautifully written—a perfect book to recommend to English Majors who don’t mind whether their literary fiction stories come with plots or not.

Me? Well, I appreciate its craft, and certainly its numerous (seemingly effortless) poetic moments, but (call me a simple Sally!) I *like* plot. There were moments of intense focus—several—but I kept wondering if this should have been a selection of short stories instead. The chapters were episodic; I lost track of names and relationships—places, ages—it covered a long span of time.

I enjoyed its strange ending, even as it annoyed me as driving a manual transmission annoys me when it jerks and stalls if you stop paying attention to the clutch. The book demands that you pay attention, even as its own mind wanders. The characters are not really likable, which also makes it hard to bond with the multiple points of view.

I’m glad I read it. Maybe I will come back to it. It was published in 1975, a time of peak disillusionment of marriages forged by values that generation no longer felt. An uncomfortable disintegration to witness. This novel spares no one.

File Under: Fiction Writers’ Fiction

If chronic adultery and obsession with beauty are

This book is sophisticated? It is beautifully written but the story is all pretentious talk, obsession with beauty, fear of aging and chronic adultery. The random pairings were just depressing. If there was ever a couple that deserved each other it was these two.

Elegant and elusive

I understand why other writers prize James Salters as a novelist. His scenes are vivid, evocative, and also oblique. There is a fascinating combination of detail given and fact withheld. Like Proust, he tells you a lot--but leaves out a lot as well. His prose recreates the feeling of certain friendships: colorful and engaging in the moment, and then somewhat puzzling in the aftermath. Yet the characters take on so much life in Salter's masterful hands. I greatly enjoyed "Light Years": arty but not arch, poetic but not self-indulgent--nothing goes on too long, everything proportionate. And no one writes similes like Salter. I reveled in it, but readers who are in search of straightforward, page-turning narrative could get frustrated This is literary fiction of the highest quality.
The narrator Mark Boyett, is very good in all the important ways--his rhythm is just right, he evokes the different characters (with their many foreign accents) nicely, and he doesn't moon over the lyrical sections. My only gripe is that he mispronounces foreign words from time to time, a pet peeve of mine: he says "restina" for "retsina," for example, puts the wrong accent on the Italian word "facile..." You get the picture. It's a small blemish on a fine achievement. Boyett found the right tonality for this delicate novel, which I would not have thought conducive to an audiobook.

Unfathomable Font of Blue: Life's Serial Goodbyes

This one hit home hard. I identified closely with the core of the male character, but I loved it most for its gorgeous profundity. The novel brims with such eloquence on both feeling life's emptiness of meaning and in appealing to life's abundance.

Salter does his damnedest (likely the best I've read) in beautifully depicting the depths of sadness that spring from life's fountain of serial goodbyes, in their many variations: from parents, from loves, from marriage, from children leaving the nest, from friends, from a time and a place and a family in years full of light, and, finally, from life.

Such poignance:

he was **reaching that age, at the edge of it, when the world suddenly becomes more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain, the world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.**