Rate this book

All That Is (2013)

by James Salter(Favorite Author)

3.36 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1400043131 (ISBN13: 9781400043132)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: My synopsis of the theme: You can observe and describe something or someone perfectly and still get it wrong. That's life. That's writing. Salter makes turning the pages easy while he explores this topic from multiple perspectives. However, the topic is anything but, and any sweetness the reader finds here will be speculative rather than realized.It's there but it's bittersweet and hard won.
review 2: It's long enough since I read the original review of All That Is that I can't remember what excited my curiosity about James Salter, but the book was somewhat disappointing and frustrating. No question that Salter is an accomplished writer: the little character sketches sprinkled throughout the novel brilliantly bring to life a host of characters, but I have to as... morek to what end? I kept wondering when the threads that frayed out in all directions would weave together into a satisfying whole. In the end they felt like literary doodling, embellishing the edges of the story line while leaving the central character and story line unsatisfactorily developed. What a slippery fellow Phil Bowman proved to be: debonair, self-assured, almost complacent, superficial and curiously impervious. It was frustrating to know so little about his inner life after living with him for the decades the novel spanned. The detail attached to the beginning of each new romance soon dissipated and the end of each chapter of his emotional life drifted into oblivion with little reflection or sense of inner growth or development. Most unforgivable was the resolution of his relationship with his mother, who he seems to care about so tenderly for a few paragraphs as she is slipping into dementia, but suddenly she is dropped and we learn abruptly she has died. If all this was a stylistic approach it left me dissatisfied. I couldn't decide if it was laziness or arrogance on Salter's part, or whether it could be a lack of courage on the part of his editors (ironic given the profession of the main character) to demand a more coherent and disciplined deployment of characterization in service of a deeper development of the central character and his story.All that said, it was worthwhile spending so much time since I finished the book parsing my response to it and defining what I felt were its shortcomings. I will be interested to read more of Salter, perhaps the ones that seem to be universally acclaimed as his best, to see how I respond to them. less

Download links for: All That Is

Advertising