All That Is (Salter) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
“I’m a frotteur,” the multiple award-winning Mr. Salter once told The Paris Review, “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.” In this book, he has rubbed them to a high sheen indeed.
Stevie Godson - New York Journal of Books

[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.
Chelsea Allison - Vogue
 

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

Highly decorated literary hero James Salter burnishes his reputation with All That Is.
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair


The 87-year-old PEN/Faulkner Award–winner’s first full-length novel in more than three decades spans some 40 years and follows the accidental life, career, and loves of book editor Philip Bowman....[whose] career is merely a vehicle for his loves and losses, connections made and missed. The women in his life somehow never suit....since Bowman fails to connect with anyone. The number of characters who parade through the book can frustrate...but Salter measures his words carefully, occasionally punctuating his elegant prose with sharp, erotic punches.
Publishers Weekly


PEN/Faulkner winner Salter publishes rarely—this is his first fiction in seven years—but when he does, it's choice. This novel features World War II veteran Philip Bowman, now a book editor, who enjoys the charged and intimate environment of the era's publishing world yet suffers in his emotional life. A real in-house favorite; don't miss.
Library Journal


For decades, Salter has been an artistic standard-bearer.... Naval officer Philip Bowman, virginal and close to his mother, makes it safely home [after World War II], moves to New York, and finds professional contentment as an editor at a small publisher. Even though he falls hard for Vivian, a wealthy southerner, he remains hermetically sealed. Their marriage fizzles quickly, and Bowman is smitten again, but he never gets it right.... Resonant passages bloom, including the one that captures the book’s subdued spirit: "The landscape was beautiful but passive. The emptiness of things rose like the sound of a choir making the sky bluer and more vast." —Donna Seamen
Booklist


[A]cclaimed veteran author chronicles the life and loves of a Manhattan book editor over a 40-year period. Okinawa, 1945. The Americans and Japanese are preparing for the climactic battle of the Pacific. Salter's sweep is panoramic but his eye, God-like, is also on the sparrow, a 20-year-old officer in the U.S. Navy, Philip Bowman. It's a stunning opening, displaying a mastery of scale that will not be repeated.... After Harvard, Bowman is hired by the high-principled owner of a small literary publishing house. He meets Vivian at a bar... Bowman believes the unlettered Vivian, now his bride, is educable; she's not.... In London on a business trip, Bowman meets a married woman...; their affair will fizzle out, like his marriage to Vivian.... Bowman floats above all that....to make matters worse, this thoughtful man fails to examine his conduct. Without his self-knowledge, there is nothing to knit the novel together. There are incidental pleasures here but, overall, a disappointing return.
Kirkus Reviews