All That Is

Reviews

“A beautiful novel, with sufficient love, heartbreak, vengeance, identity confusion, longing, and euphoria of language to have satisfied Shakespeare.”

“A consistently elegant and enjoyable novel, full of verve and wisdom.”

“Enthralling…A vividly imagined and beautifully written evocation of a postwar world.”

“The best novel I’ve read in years. All That Is will be treasured by its readers. Salter’s vivid, lucid prose does exquisite justice to his subject—the relentless struggle to make good on our own humanity. Once again he has delivered to us a novel of the highest artistry.”

“This masterpiece is a smooth, absorbing narrative studded with bright particulars. If God is in the details, this book is divine.”

“Salter plunges into the capricious world of book publishing…Think Mad Men with more tweed…The sentence-to-sentence craftsmanship is stunning, and Salter can still write a perfect love scene.”

“Highly decorated literary hero James Salter burnishes his reputation with All That Is.”

“Salter is one of the most celebrated living American writers, and after a seven-year hiatus he returns with possibly his best work yet.”

“The everyday may be one of the hardest things to write about…To indelibly record the trivial and the portentous with the same ravenous affection, thereby persuading us that there may be no difference between the two when assaying the worth of a life or divining its mystery—that is a crowning achievement and it’s Salter’s to claim.”        

“[Salter] is a master of the sentence so vivid [that] it stuns. His sweeping new All That Is will refresh the canon of one of America’s best living writers.”

“In All That Is, the sense of time passing is ever-present. It’s a panoramic book, an intimate epic that spans seven decades in the life of Philip Bowman…All That Is abounds with Salter’s signature vivid imagery…And once again, there are unabashedly erotic scenes that border on the operatic—passages that may come as an outright shock to some.”

“The best novel [I’ve] read in a long time…All That Is is Salter’s version of a contemporary American War and Peace, with the war, World War II, in this instance, coming first…Reading and re-reading all this, I found myself in a state that Salter’s work—as with the finest writers we know—often induces. You breathe deeply and your pulse races. The sentences, the scenes, the life, the life.”

“[A] sweeping and lovely book steeped in the high drama of romance. All That Is follows Philip Bowman from his service in World War II through a career as a book editor in a bygone New York. There is no plot in a conventional sense, but in another way it has the most resonant plot of all: the unspooling of a life. The book reads like a highly intimate biography in which the search for romance—and sex—plays a starring role. Some of Bowman’s relationships come to brutal ends, but always they begin with seduction, and Salter never stints on bedroom scenes…Salter still has the muscular authority and unembarrassed romanticism that can make a man sweat.”

“In [Salter’s] care, the dust of the mundane is wiped away. Events resonate. Descriptions sparkle. Salter’s mastery is such that from the affecting and effective early scenes of protagonist Philip Bowman’s experiences off Okinawa during World War II, through all the twists and turns of a life played out in a rapidly changing America, nothing about this book disappoints…As absorbing as the brief chapters on war are, the author’s scenes of seduction are equally realistic and memorable…In this book, he has rubbed words to a high sheen indeed.”

“Exquisite. In widely admired novels, Salter’s great subject has been the often highly charged relations between men and women. His new novel, All That Is, revisits that subject in a mature, unsentimental story of one man’s restless search for love…The connective tissue of the story is the series of romantic entanglements into which Bowman slips almost haphazardly. His relationships flourish and fade in a variety of sharply observed settings. Whether his setting is the Virginia horse country, a stylish dinner party in London, or a Seville café, Salter writes with authority. And in painting those scenes, he captures the angst of the privileged classes who seem to have all anyone could desire and yet long for something that lies just out of reach. Salter has long been lauded for his effortlessly beautiful prose and his deft characterization. Those talents are undiminished.”

“Striking…seamless…beautifully done. The experience of reading [All That Is] is akin to the panoramic view of flying, when aloft and moving fast. That is Salter’s point…we drift through life, this novel suggests, without ever really getting to know those around us.”

“All That Is contains a brilliant indictment of love, even as it revels in its sensual transports…It is perhaps not an accident that Salter would publish this very beautiful book at the age of eighty-eight. He senses the end in beginnings, applies the acquired wisdom of years and the terrifying perspective of accumulated experiences to the ordinary goings on the heart…It is this sense of being outside of one’s own life, one’s own loves, of experiencing or remembering an entire marriage or relationship as ‘things glimpsed from a train’ that gives Salter’s work both its depth and its difficulty, its alarming insight and its grace.”

“A masterpiece…a commanding, sensual tour de force…I have learned from everything James Salter has written. In [him] I discovered not only an exquisite writer but a manner of living.”

“In an era characterized by sex writing that defaults to irony and comic dysfunction, Salter restores that erotic experience to a kind of exalted, tantric level throughout his books (including this new one) that is simply hot…All That Is [is] the sweeping story of a book editor’s experiences in love and war in the 1940s…The title strikes me as a kind of summational claim for the adequacy or the fullness of life as it’s lived, as opposed to another world or some metaphysical longing or longing for elsewhere.”

“Joe Barrett is perfectly cast, with the warm, slightly graveled voice of a man who, like Salter’s Philip Bowman, has been around the block a few times. His performance is flawless…The production is equally polished…Pure listening pleasure. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

“Achingly real…Salter renders the first blushes of Bowman’s loves exquisitely—their giddiness, occasional illicitness, eroticism—and his bewilderment after the relationships fail…Salter punctuates his elegant prose with sharp, erotic punches.”

“With the ever-changing panorama of New York City and New York publishing as background, Salter addresses time, love, and the mystery and wonder of life itself.” 

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