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James Salter writes with a profoundly male point of view. Despite being over 80 years old, he still can summon that intensity of sexual desire that courses through a young man’s veins. In “All That Is,” while this urge is not the central theme of the novel, it again often takes center stage. Salter’s genius is the way he can stitch together a series of vignettes, capture these moments so visually, and lay them out there for us to discover the depth of meaning. The prosaic is profound. He simply drops a sentence on the reader, or sometimes he lulls in, allowing us to see for ourselves, to feel a truth.First, “All That Is” is a series of chapters, quite literally chapters in the life of Philip Bowman and the people in his life, from the early coming of age, to midlife maturity. He opens with a powerful epigraph:“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”And he writes with such tight, concise perfection. The opening sentence: “All night in the darkness the water sped past.”Even when describing war, he does it cleanly and vividly with the fewest words needed: “…men were slaughtered in enemy fire dense as bees, the terror of the beaches, swollen bodies lolling in the surf, the nation’s sons, some of them beautiful.”More: “Day was rising, a pale Pacific dawn that had no real horizon with the tops of the early clouds gathering light. The sea was empty. Slowly the sun appeared, flooding across the water and turning it white.”While the novel feels autobiographical, he is wise to have the lead character as a Navy man instead of a pilot, like he was. Salter is certainly knowledgeable enough about the Navy to make the story credible, and it adds a distance that makes it feel more artistic.And this perfect description of a Navy man that anyone in the military would recognize immediately: “He drank himself into a stupor every night but was always crisp and well-shaved in the morning.”Salter surrounds Bowman with a cast of peripheral characters that all add dimension, reality, and depth to his life. We are trained by Hollywood that stories must have an “economy of characters;” every one must play a key role in the story. But Salter does not follow this wrongheaded approach in his novels. Sometimes it is more difficult to care about these bit players, but at other times, they profoundly affect your heart.The war ends, and Salter sums it all up in a sentence: “In the gutters were bits of burnt paper, banknotes, all that remained of the Imperial dream.”Salter’s power is in conveying simple, deep truths, in such a clean, poetic way: “Long after the uniform had lost its authenticity and glamour, the cap, strangely, would still have its power.”He can be lyrical with his descriptions; I like how in this sentence he compares the end of a day with something sensual: “Late in the day, the deep, resounding bells began, solemn and grand, ringing on and on almost without reason and finally fading in calm, endless strokes, soft as caresses.”The way he describes Bowman’s innocence: “He knew what the ignudi were but not the simply nude. He remained innocent and teeming with desire.”Later, the beautiful passage describing his inevitable loss of innocence:“As she slid from her white panties, a white that seemed sacred, he barely breathed. The fineness of her, the blondish fleece. He could not believe they were doing this. (…) Bowman lay back in awe at what had happened and feeling intoxicated by a world that had suddenly opened wide to the greatest pleasure, pleasure beyond knowing.” Even here, we realize that Vivian, his first love, may have been more of a symbol than a woman he specifically loved.It is easy to misinterpret Salter’s focus on sexuality as banal or crude male drive. Instead, it is something more, deeper, metaphorical, a physical expression of growth and creation and impermanence of life.One of Salter’s themes throughout all of his work is this cruel fact of impermanence, the ephemeral quality of love and even life itself. He expresses it so beautifully in this passage:“They knew. Everything knew, the beetles, the frogs, the crows solemnly walking across the lawn. The sun was at its zenith and embraced the world, but it was ending, all that one loved was at risk.” Yes, just as in “A Sport and a Pastime,” when the lovers knew that things were at their peak, this implied they would not last.And finally, as it ends: “The same couple, the same bed, yet now not the same.”Vivian is only a milestone, perhaps.“He loved her for not only what she was but what she might be, the idea that she might be otherwise did not occur to him or did not matter.”How do men and women fall in love for the wrong person? In his concise beautiful style, he just says it:“When you love you see a future according to your dreams.”A running subtheme of the story is the role of literature in society and our lives. Bowman is an editor, and works with Baum, a publisher. When Bowman is shocked at a woman’s house that has no books in it, not even a bookshelf, it is clear he could never be with her. Salter slips some truths in this subplot, too, when he has Baum say:“Most novels, even the great ones, don’t pretend to be true. You believe them, the even become part of your life, but not as literal truth.” Really? Is Salter just playing with us?Salter beautifully paints the picture of Bowman aging as only a man can: “…he had been young for a long time and now was at his true age, old enough for civilized comforts and not too old for the primal ones.” As Bowman settles into midlife, Salter again sneaks into the novel a short truth: “In life you need friends and a good place to live.” Notice, he does not say you need sex or women, even though these are constants throughout his work.And later, this truth: “Age doesn’t arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has.”The grand sweep of time in this novel allows Bowman to look back on the earlier events in his life, proving the epigraph true: “He remembered, but only as a collection of certain incidents that were like photographs what Vivian had been like. He didn’t remember her voice and only with wonder what had persuaded him that she was the girl he should marry.”New York City is a supporting character in this novel, and I love the way Salter describes it here:“At the far end was the financial district, and then, from midtown on up, the countless tall buildings, the great boxes of light. It was like a dream, trying to imagine it all, the windows and entire floors that never went dark, the world you wanted to be in.”There are countless other passages like this, in which truths are discovered through small vignettes of Bowman’s life. Perhaps the one I like the best is this one that describes how you fall in love with a woman: “It was always the first word, the first look, the first embrace, the first fatal dance. It was there waiting.”It’s sad, yet so truthful, the way Bowman talks about love: “I was stricken, I was blinded by it. I didn’t know anything. Of course, neither did she. That was a long time ago.”The novel meanders, never slowly, but at times the secondary characters lose my interest. But by 2/3 of the way through the novel, Salter makes my heart sing. There are chapters and stories so touching and emotional and real that it is impossible not to feel, to understand on a visceral level what is happening. This is the emotional apotheosis of the novel, and he peaks perfectly.As Bowman matures, he becomes a full man. Salter describes this: “…in the bareness, the simplicity, was ample room for happiness.” He is in middle age, and: “He was midway or a little past that depending on where you began counting. His real life had begun at 18, the life he now stood at the summit of.”This is the grand sweep of one man’s history, a rather ordinary life, full of color and interesting people and loves. Some of the affairs were quick, “…he amounted to a few brief pages. Not even.” And when loves ended, Salter perfectly captures the emotion anyone who has loved and lost feels: “It would be better never to have met her, but what sense did that make? It had been the luckiest day of his life.”Even late in his life, Bowman “…believed in love – all his life he had – but now it was likely to be too late.” And “…time was limitless, mornings, nights, all of life ahead.”From start to finish, this novel thrills, makes the prosaic divine, and examines “All That Is” in life; love, loss, loyalty, and friendship. In one small volume, Salter has concisely spilled out on the page everything that he finds important in life, every lesson, every affair, every emotion, everything that matters.This is Salter’s magnum opus.