I liked this novel less and less as I read it. By the time I finished the "revenge" chapter near the end of the book, I'd have to say I hated it. I loved Salter's A Sport and a Pastime (1967) and enjoyed Solo Faces (1979), and was eager to read this, Salter's first novel in over three decades. It feels like Salter taking his shot at writing The Great American Novel - a book spanning the post-war decades, bringing in dozens of characters, and shifting between the literary scenes of New York and London and Paris. The publisher blurb promises "a fiercely intimate account of the great shocks and grand pleasures of being alive." But that's not what I found in these pages. I found unpleasant, uninteresting characters drifting along unexamined lives, picking up and discarding others at whim and with ease, failing to create any meaning. Grand pleasures? Not hardly. If this is all that is, damn, shoot me now.

I've read other reviewers accusing this novel specifically, and sometimes Salter generally, of misogyny. And I can see it. His other novels I've read, which I did in fact like, are strongly male-centered points of view and they treat women as accessories, generally, and not always kindly. But this novel goes considerably further in its unflattering treatment of female characters, though the men often appear as assholes as well. I do find myself wondering if when he writes of a character

He didn't like women who looked down on you for whatever reason. Within limits, he liked the opposite.

he is succinctly describing his own attitude.

And I have to wonder why so many of the characters Salter creates here are said to be on their third marriage or so, even when the character only appears for a few pages and that information wouldn't seem all that important:

Kenneth Wells was his name. He and his wife - she was his third wife, he didn't particularly look like a man who'd been married a number of times, he was homely, his eyesight was bad; she had been married to his neighbor and one day the two of them had simply gone off to Mexico together and not come back - lived in a house that Bowman liked and that always stayed in his mind as a model.

Wells only exists for 3 pages.

Evelyn Hinds was a dumpling of a woman with bright eyes that took things in immediately and a ready laugh. She was at ease with people. Her first husband had crashed at sea - it was thought he crashed, no one ever saw him again - but she'd been married two times after that and was on good terms with both her former husbands."

Hinds exists for one page.

There are plenty of other examples. What's with the compulsion to give so many characters so many spouses? To show how much you don't believe in things like commitment?

So then there's the ugliest chapter near the end, in which our protagonist, Philip Bowman, seduces the college aged daughter of a former lover who betrayed him, flies her to Paris with him, fucks her a few more times, then abandons her alone in a hotel room with no money.

He had gotten up early and quietly gathered his things. She was sleeping, an arm beneath the pillow, a bare leg showing. The freshness of her, even afterwards. He had forgiven her mother. Come and get your daughter, he thought.

Well, at least she's still fresh, thank God, even after the deflowering by an asshole decades older than she is. Shit.
( )

This book had wonderful reviews so it was extra disappointing to me that I didn't care for it. Maybe I missed some deeper meaning along the way but I didn't enjoy Bowman's dysfunctional relationships with women. He was clueless and the women were portrayed as naive and/or sneaky and cruel. ( )

The history of my family and he didn't even change anyone's name. ( )

This is Salter's last novel, loosely centred around the life of Philip Bowman, a man who serves as a junior officer in the Pacific in the World War II navy and later becomes an editor for a New York publisher, thus obviously paralleling Salter's own life. It's an odd sort of novel, though, as Salter keeps telling us the detailed back-stories of new minor characters as though they were going to be the central characters of their own short stories, but then dropping them again before anything very important has happened to them. Mostly, all they get from their chapter in the limelight is a meal out, sometimes followed by a night of passion. Occasionally they get to come back later in the book, but rarely as more than an interesting coincidence.

Salter also breaks off from storytelling from time to time to explain the Second World War, or England, or Lorca, or something else we already know about, or to complain that "gay" used to be such a useful little word. But he can probably be forgiven for that sort of thing, given that he was in his late eighties when this came out.

Apart from that, it is a beautifully written book. Straight down the middle of the great tradition of American prose-writing of the 1920s and 30s. Lovely clear, plain sentences, dotted with sparkling bits of ornamentation where we least expect them: if Hemingway and Henry Miller had still been around in the 2010s, they would undoubtedly have approved. It's easy to see why Salter attracted such praise, but a bit more difficult to see what he's trying to do with this book. It just seems to be an endless succession of clever men jumping into bed with beautiful women, who seem to get steadily younger as the men get older. ( )

This book and its author were ill-served by all the hype that surrounded its publication - just a pleasant, episodic story-of-a-life. Ordinary writing, felt very old-fashioned, like a mid-list novel from the 50s. For a much better novel of this ilk, read William Boyd's ANY HUMAN HEART or Richard Yates' A SPECIAL PROVIDENCE. ( )