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About the Book

About the Book

Light Years

Light Years is not so much the story of a marriage (it may not be a story at all, in the familiar sense of that word) as it is a time-lapse portrait of one, the kind of portrait that might have been painted by Seurat. Its protagonists, Viri and Nedra Berland, are observed over a period of some twenty years. We see them hosting dinners at their house in the Hudson River valley, shopping at the finest stores in New York, playing with their children on the beach at Amagansett, in bed with each other and with their lovers. Salter follows them through contentment, disillusionment, and bereavement, and into the black hole of divorce. From that hole Nedra emerges energized, traveling, taking lovers and shrugging them off, basking finally in the true love of her children before her early death. But Viri never fully surfaces; without Nedra he becomes the failure he always feared he might be: gets humiliatingly drunk at the home of friends who once envied him, marries, badly, an Italian woman who can hold him only through guilt and pity.

This is not to suggest that Viri is Nedra's victim, any more than Nedra is someone else's. Salter's view of marriage is informed by an aesthetic that is utterly at odds with fashionable psychologies of blame. Each protagonist's life is "mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it . . . can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one" (p. 23). And that life may be changed in a moment, as Nedra's is when she reads a single paragraph in a biography of the painter Kandinsky and decides to leave Viri. Given such a view of life, how can we attempt to weigh its actions on any moral scale? Light Years does not invite judgment or even easy empathy with its flawed human beings. It asks us to watch them with the sort of compassion that Nedra herself feels one night, as she surveys herself in bed with the husband she no longer loves: "If they had been another couple she would have been attracted to them, she would have loved them, even--they were so miserable" (p. 125).

Light Years
by James Salter

  • Publication Date: January 31, 1995
  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN-10: 0679740732
  • ISBN-13: 9780679740735