Light Years

"My first James Salter novel is A Sport and a Pastime. It’s short and amazing. It’s not about adultery, it’s about a passionate love affair between a young, callow American guy and an even younger French woman. And the idea of the affair is that they just completely surrender themselves. And that is a religious idea. But what they surrender themselves to is what Salter calls “incandescent sexuality”. They are just illuminated by it. And the more transgressive the sex , the more incandescent. Salter, when talking about this novel, says he wanted to contrast or explore the elicit and the divine. To show that you could have purity within licentiousness. I don’t think Salter is necessarily a religious writer. I don’t think of myself as a religious writer either. But he’s obviously intrigued by the idea. He uses sexuality, completely unbridled sexuality, not so much as an affirmation of self but as a way for the two characters to completely expose themselves to one another. To give that gift of surrender. The man calls it “throwing away the oars”. And it is a kind of religious idea. Even if you’re not religious. Salter and Greene are both interested in the way the lovers are catapulted into something beyond reason. But they retain that recognition – a sort of criminal recognition – of the other person. Well there’s nothing childish about it, but it’s true that adultery abstracts the adulterers from ordinary life. There’s almost no ordinary life in A Sport and a Pastime. The two antagonists live as though they have no jobs. They drive around France for what seems like a century. They spend a lot of time in their car, go from hotel to hotel…. It’s almost like Lolita. They’re always talking about the cost of petrol and so on. It’s part of the romance. And the hero, the young man, at the end of the book he dies in a car accident. Adultery novels all end in death. This is what’s so grim. Why? I’d like to see an adultery story end with the characters going on their way, but there’s always a death. It’s just an obsession. I didn’t want to talk about Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina on this list because I just found those books so grim. Oh they’re wonderful. Salter says in Light Years that people lead two kinds of lives. There’s the life that people believe you’re leading and then there’s something else. He doesn’t say exactly what it is, he just says it’s what we want to know about. That’s what he does in the short stories – Dusk and Last Night – and that’s what he does in Light Years too. He projects you right away into that something else."

"a modern classic that I loved."

""Light Years," by James Salter."

"James Salter's "Light Years," one of the most incisive novels about the passing of time, which I read seven times while writing "So Old, So Young"."

"James Salter's "Light Years," which I read every few years."