Light Years

By: James Salter

Narrated by: Mark Boyett

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.

Beautiful story!

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

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.

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.