And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.
Nedra and Viri are married. Nedra is beautiful, creative, mysterious; Viri is a middling architect who dreams of being famous. They live in the suburbs of New York City with their daughters, Danny and Franca. From the outside, their life seems perfect, and often it seems that way from the inside, too: see, for example, the pair painstakingly huddled over the kitchen table writing an illustrated book about the mystery of eels for their daughters. Viri puts on plays for them, and elaborate Easter egg hunts (the speckled ones are more points than the plain, and there are several golden bees worth five times as much--some, he explains, should be hidden so that they are never found). But of course, there are cracks: both of them are carrying on affairs.
Is it that kind of novel? You know the one I mean: a mid-century family, a home in Westchester, adultery, prose that leers at women, an insistence the American family is in disarray, but for reasons having to do entirely with postwar ennui, and not with, say, income inequality or the stifling nature of patriarchal institutions. Well, it is and it isn't. It certainly checks all of those boxes, but the description seems to fall short of capturing what Light Years really is or does. It's highly impressionistic, floating, it often seems, from one dinner party to another. Friends of Nedra and Viri drift in and out like friends in real life do, appearing for a while to be crucially important and then fading away, having left few traces of themselves. The marriage does begin to dissolve, does end, but in the final reckoning it's hard to figure out why; it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the affairs, which mean next to nothing. A few moments shine out brilliantly--like the collaboration over eels, or Viri's encounter with a tailor who has devoted his life to making beautiful shirts, like a kind of yogi--but fail to generate conflict. Conflict is there, but it seems to have birthed itself.
The prose is absolutely impeccable, yet Light Years often left me feeling cold. "Cold," in fact, is one of the words that seems to characterize the novel most perfectly. The first line of Part Two might as well be the novel's epigraph: "In the morning the light came in silence." Everything in this novel is cold, light, silence; Salter lingers over the image of the Hudson on a winter's afternoon, or the sensation of being in a dark room in the middle of the day, doing nothing at all. I found it a relief, actually, when toward the novel's end the divorced Viri relocates to the sweaty chaos of Rome, where his life is reinvigorated by a new woman and a new environment. But for much of the novel I felt myself skipping off of the words like--oh, I guess, a stone being skipped on the frozen Hudson river, with some seagulls scattered around.
One thing I think Salter does really well is capture the way that violence, sickness, and death punctuated the sterility of bourgeois existence. Those things haunt the edges of the novel, affecting at first acquaintances, then friends, and then family. The death of Nedra's father is one of the most touchingly rendered passages in the book, and perhaps even moreso because it's neither young nor unexpected. As they age, Nedra and Viri must confront these things among their friends:
His voice was the only thing unchanged, his voice and character, but the structure that held them was dissolving. All the old and interconnected knowledge--architecture joined to zoology and Persian myth, recipes for hare, the acquaintance with painters, museums, inland rivers dark with trout--all would vanish when the great inner chambers failed, when in one final hour the rooms of his life dropped away like a building being wrecked. His body had turned against him; the harmony that once reigned within it had disappeared.
Of course, the tragedy of these dissolutions is always, in part, due to the fact that you know they'll come for you one day, too, and they do. The title Light Years, I suppose, is meant to emphasize the way that life is both vast--it is the only time and space allotted to us--but the way that it passes so quickly. I've found life a little warmer and more messy than Salter seems to, but it's easy to see why others, whom the novel has touched more deeply, have found it to be underappreciated.
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