{"id":14220,"date":"2011-04-06T17:11:46","date_gmt":"2011-04-06T21:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=14220"},"modified":"2011-04-06T17:11:46","modified_gmt":"2011-04-06T21:11:46","slug":"dreams-and-work-on-light-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/06\/dreams-and-work-on-light-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Dreams and Work: On ‘Light Years’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our Spring Revel<\/a> is April 12. In anticipation of the event, The Daily is featuring a series of essays<\/a> celebrating James Salter, who is being honored this year with <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s Hadada Prize<\/a>. If you\u2019re interested in purchasing tickets to the Revel, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

<\/p><\/div>I discovered James Salter just late enough, in grad school, at the suggestion of a brooding alcoholic, the best writer in the room, with whom I\u2019d become entangled in a very Salter-esque doomed affair. I was the writer who\u2019d gush about the stylists, steer the conversations from plot and story to diction and syntax, the one who\u2019d make over-earnest pleas about art over mechanics, always to the rolled eyes of the Ivy Leaguers who made up most the program. Most everything I wrote failed on a story level as much as it succeeded on a sentence level, and so this writer-fling of mine one day said, \u201cYou should read Salter. Because he does that thing you like. But he also tells stories. He can help you.\u201d<\/p>\n

I dashed to Light Years<\/em>\u2014Salter\u2019s fourth novel, published in 1975\u2014as I did to any of his suggestions. Up to that point, stylists meant maximalists, hysterical realists, the breathless and the sprawling: William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Stephen Dixon. I had never encountered a minimalist I could live inside of. But as minimal as Light Years<\/em> was aesthetically, it was maximal emotionally. The sentences were sharp and piercing, alarmingly brief, and yet they contained entire lifetimes rendered in stream of consciousness within three-word observations about the seasons. \u201cI\u2019m a frotteur<\/em>, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible,\u201d Salter said in his Paris Review<\/em> interview. I lived for that poet\u2019s spirit in my storytellers. That taut and yet tender surface simplicity was applied to amplifying the elemental in this world destroyed me, as if trees and desks and fog and smoke are <\/em>their own metaphors in a universe that is essentially figurative:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

The trees are naked. The eels sleep.
\n…
\nLife is weather. Life is meals.
\n…
\nDreams and work.
\n…
\nThe mornings were white, the trees still bare.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And other times he punctuates the spare landscapes with nearly proverbial and aphoristic declarations as timeless and true as the sleeping eels and white mornings:<\/p>\n

\n

We preserve ourselves as if that were important and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching until there is no one\u2014we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The book was everything I was not. Crisp, distilled, minimal, elegant, somehow patrician in its Hamptons country seasoning and midcentury American bohemia trimming; I was indoorsy, devoutly urban, messy, rambling, broke, Iranian, a blur of black frizzy hair and purple mixed metaphors. In the first several pages, I was highly conscious of my inadequacy; all I could think was how my family of four, the Khakpours\u2014immigrant lower-middle class, adjunct professor dad and accountant mom, grateful for their basic survival in suburban LA\u2014were the opposite of Salter\u2019s family of four, the Berlands\u2014creative upper-middle class, a restless New York architect and his perilously free-spirited wife, who could afford to move just outside the city to the idyllic Hudson, who could afford a certain bourgeois discontentment. But as I progressed, I began to read it as Americans might read foreign writers, for anthropological insights, for their very otherness, for escape to an exotic place, et cetera.\u00a0 And then a fourth of the way into it\u2014Part II\u2014past the pet pony and shirt fittings and seemingly immaculate dinner parties\u2014I started to forget my own insecurities as they melded into Viri and Nedra Berland\u2019s. I lost myself in a book\u2014a book about marital crisis, a topic that never interested me\u2014for the first time in nearly a decade. It felt like I had discovered a new continent when I found a literature that I thought, against all odds, could reach everyone.<\/p>\n


<\/p>\n

DAYS AFTER<\/small> I finished it, carrying it much as a child does a favorite stuffed animal, one of my fellow grad students\u2014a woman\u2014looked me up and down, puzzled, and said, \u201cBut he\u2019s such a guy\u2019s writer.\u201d<\/em> It shocked me then, though by now I\u2019ve heard it many times. For Salter has always avoided Hemingway\u2019s bullfights-broads-and-booze virility; he says in his Paris Review<\/em> interview that \u201cI deem as heroic those who have the harder task, face it unflinchingly and live. In this world women do that.\u201d And one can argue that Light Years<\/em> is Nedra\u2019s story, though it goes on without her in Viri\u2019s hands. Nedra is as entirely unique and yet universal as any woman\u2014at once hard and extravagant, both old and young, an artist and an observer, creator and destroyer, wanderer and homebody, a mother and the ultimate antimatriarch. Losing yourself in Nedra is dangerous; my experience\u2014nearly a decade since I first read the book\u2014is evidence enough that she can haunt you a few steps ahead of yourself.<\/p>\n

I taught the book five years later in an advanced fiction seminar, where all the poets and language writers swooned and a few genre fiction writers protested. \u201cBut what\u2019s the story here?\u201d a student of mine kept asking. He also seemed alarmed by the modesty of Salter\u2019s claim that the idea for the novel came from a Jean Renoir quote: \u201cThe only things that are important in life are the things you remember.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s it?\u201d he said, to which another student snapped, \u201cWhat else is there?\u201d Indeed, dump out its contents and Light Years<\/em> is just scattered bits of memory, a collage of the surviving instances all in their different lighting. William Dowie, in his 1988 essay, “A Final Glory: The Novels of James Salter,\u201d calls his style, as many have, \u201cimpressionistic\u201d in its portrayal of \u201cthe cumulative effect of our smallest actions. The pattern of Viri and Nedra’s daily life leads to their ultimate fates, not simply their dramatic acts of un-faithfulness.\u201d The power of the smallest things is everywhere in Salter, in content and in form, but as you hurdle toward the end\u2014past the fifties and through the seventies, into Amagansett and out of Rome, over the rebound and around the lovers\u2014you realize small<\/em> suddenly means something else altogether.<\/p>\n

This book changed my life. Salter would see past the cheap glitter of hyperbole and clich\u00e9 there\u2014after all, it\u2019s Nedra\u2019s reading of one passage in a book on Kandinsky that marks her most urgent doing and ultimate undoing:<\/p>\n

\n

The power to change one\u2019s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark \u2026 The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Porochista Khakpour<\/a>, author of the novel<\/em> Sons and Other Flammable Objects, contributes essays to publications such as<\/em> The New York Times,<\/em> The Los Angeles Times,<\/em> The Daily Beast, among others, and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.<\/em><\/p>\n

See also: Jhumpa Lahiri on <\/em>Light Years<\/a>. To read more essays for James Salter Month, click here<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our Spring Revel is April 12. In anticipation of the event, The Daily is featuring a series of essays celebrating James Salter, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review\u2019s Hadada Prize. If you\u2019re interested in purchasing tickets to the Revel, click here. I discovered James Salter just late enough, in grad school, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2013],"tags":[369,2093],"class_list":["post-14220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-james-salter-month","tag-james-salter","tag-light-years"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDreams and Work: On 'Light Years' by Porochista Khakpour<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 6, 2011 \u2013 Our Spring Revel is April 12. 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