All That Is

A Master’s Last Word

All That Is, published in 2013 when its author was eighty-seven, was James Salter’s final novel and a luminous capstone to one of the most distinguished careers in American letters. Salter — the author of A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, a writer revered by other writers for the sheer beauty of his prose — was never a popular novelist in the commercial sense; he was a stylist’s stylist, a writer of sentences so precise, sensual, and quietly devastating that his admirers spoke of him with something like awe. All That Is, his first novel in more than three decades, gathered up the preoccupations of his life’s work — love and its passing, desire, time, the texture of a single existence — into a final, radiant meditation on what a life is made of and what, if anything, remains of it.

The novel follows Philip Bowman from the end of the Second World War, where it opens with a vivid account of a young naval officer’s experience in the brutal Pacific battle of Okinawa, through the long arc of his postwar American life. Bowman returns home, goes to Harvard, and finds his way into the genteel, vanished world of New York literary publishing, where he becomes an editor and spends his career. Around this quiet professional life Salter arranges the things that actually constitute it: love affairs and a marriage that fails, betrayals dealt and received, friendships, travel, the accumulation of years. There is no driving plot, no grand external drama after Okinawa; the novel is the record of a life as it is lived — its loves above all, rendered with Salter’s famous frankness and sensuality — and of the way time carries each moment, each person, each passion, inexorably away.

The Radiance of the Prose

To read Salter is, first and last, to read his sentences, and All That Is is a feast of them. He is one of the supreme prose stylists in American fiction, and his writing has a clarity, a sensuousness, and a quiet precision that can make the most ordinary moment — a meal, a conversation, a morning, an act of love — shimmer with significance. He writes about desire and the body with a frankness and beauty almost no other novelist matches, and about time and loss with a tender, unflinching wisdom. The pleasure of the novel is the pleasure of the language: the way a single sentence can hold a whole mood or life, the way Salter notices and renders the texture of experience. For readers who care about prose, who believe that how a thing is written matters as much as what happens, All That Is is a profound and continual delight.

Beneath the beauty lies a serious meditation. The novel is, finally, about what a life amounts to — about love as the thing that gives existence its meaning and its pain, about the passage of time and the way everything is lost to it, about memory and what endures. Salter, writing near the end of his own long life, infuses the book with a valedictory wisdom, a sense of summing up, that gives its quiet surface real depth. It is a book about all that is — the fullness of a life — and all that passes, and it carries the weight of a master’s final reckoning with those themes.

The Honest Caveats

Two honest notes for prospective readers. First, this is emphatically a novel of prose and sensibility rather than plot. After the war, almost nothing “happens” in the conventional sense; the book proceeds as a series of episodes, encounters, and affairs, a life rendered rather than a story driven, and readers who need narrative momentum and a shaped, climactic plot will find it diffuse, even meandering. Its rewards are those of texture, language, and accumulated feeling, not of suspense or structure. You read it for the sentences and the slow deepening, not for what comes next.

Second, All That Is reflects, and largely shares, an older male sensibility, particularly in its treatment of women and sex. Bowman’s life is told substantially through his romantic and erotic relationships, and the women are often rendered primarily as objects of his desire and sources of his pain; Salter’s frank sensuality, beautiful as it is, comes filtered through a male gaze that some readers will find dated or limiting. This is part of the texture of the book and of Salter’s work generally, and it is best approached with awareness: the beauty is real, and so is the partiality of perspective.

A Luminous Farewell

All That Is stands as a fitting final testament from one of America’s great prose stylists — a luminous, sensual, quietly profound meditation on love, time, and the substance of a single life, written in sentences of rare beauty. It asks little in the way of plot and rewards everything in the way of attention, and for readers attuned to its frequencies it is a deeply moving and lasting book. Salter spent a lifetime perfecting the art of the sentence and the rendering of experience, and here, at the end, he brought that art to bear on the largest subject of all: what it is to have lived, and loved, and lost it all to time.

For readers who prize prose above plot and love reflective, sensual literary fiction about love and the passing of a life, All That Is is an exquisite and rewarding read — the radiant last word of a master.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A luminous, sensual late masterpiece from one of America’s finest prose stylists. Salter’s account of a single life in postwar New York publishing is diffuse in plot and filtered through an older male sensibility, but radiant in sentence and profound in its meditation on love, time, and what endures. A fitting final word.

For more of Salter and luminous, prose-driven fiction, see Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, and Stoner.