Where to Start with James Salter: A Reading Guide
Where to start with James Salter — whether to begin with A Sport and a Pastime or Light Years. A complete reading guide to the American writer's essential novels.
James Salter (1925–2015) was the American novelist and former Air Force pilot whose work — sparse in volume (only a handful of novels and story collections over a fifty-year career) and extraordinary in prose quality — made him one of the most admired writers in American fiction, despite never having the commercial success his reputation among other writers might suggest. Salter flew combat missions in Korea before resigning his commission to write; the experience of danger and physical intensity informs both his fiction and his memoir. He was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction.
Where to Start: A Sport and a Pastime (1967)
The essential Salter — and the novel that established his reputation. The narrator is a young American photographer living in France, connected at a remove to Philip Dean, a handsome Yale dropout roaming the provincial roads in a borrowed car. Dean meets Anne-Marie Costallat, a shop girl in Autun; they begin an affair that the narrator can only partly witness and partly imagine.
The novel is famous for two things: its explicit descriptions of the affair (innovative and still striking in their precision and heat) and the unreliability of its narration. The photographer acknowledges that he cannot know everything he describes; some of what he tells us is fantasy. This instability — between what is observed and what is imagined — turns the novel into a meditation on desire itself: the way the erotic imagination works by filling in what it cannot see, making the beloved more vivid through absence than through presence.
What makes the novel work beyond its erotic content is the rendering of provincial France. Salter had spent time in France, and the small cities — Autun, Dijon, Chalon — are described with the vivid, slightly melancholy attention of someone genuinely in love with a foreign place. The atmosphere is extraordinary.
For readers coming to Salter for the first time, A Sport and a Pastime is immediate, intense, and entirely unlike anything else in American fiction.
Light Years (1975)
The other great Salter — a marriage dissolving slowly on the Hudson River. Elegiac, domestic, and written in the same exceptional prose. The right second read for readers who want a different register: less intense, longer, quieter.
Reading James Salter
Begin with A Sport and a Pastime — it is the most immediately striking of his novels. Read Light Years after for his more domestic and elegiac mode. Both are standalone.
For the full James Salter bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the James Salter author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with James Salter?
A Sport and a Pastime (1967) is the recommended starting point — Salter's novel of two young Americans in provincial France, structured as the unreliable narration of a photographer observing the erotic affair between his companion and a young French woman. The most intensely written of his novels; the one that established his reputation for exceptional prose. Light Years is the alternative starting point for readers who want his more domestic and elegiac register.
What is A Sport and a Pastime about?
A Sport and a Pastime follows Philip Dean, a Yale dropout driving through provincial France, and Anne-Marie Costallat, a young French woman he meets in Autun. Their affair — observed and narrated by a photographer who is partly imagining what he cannot see — is described with unusual explicitness and lyrical precision. The narrator's unreliability (he acknowledges that some of what he describes may be fantasy) creates a meditation on desire, observation, and the impossibility of knowing another person's experience. France is rendered with the vivid specificity of a foreign country seen through passionate attention.
What is Light Years about?
Light Years (1975) is Salter's novel of a marriage — Nedra and Viri Berland, living beautifully on the Hudson River, raising their daughters, hosting dinners, maintaining the rituals of a good life. The novel follows their marriage across twenty years as it quietly dissolves: not through drama or infidelity (though there is both) but through the gradual divergence of two people who have lived together so long that they no longer see each other. Among the most beautiful novels about the slow erosion of marriage in American fiction.
Is James Salter's prose style difficult?
Salter is one of the most admired prose stylists in American fiction — his sentences are precise, imagistic, and often startling. His style is not difficult in the sense of obscure or demanding of specialist knowledge; it rewards attention because the sentences are doing more than they appear to at first reading. Writers consistently cite him as one of the finest prose stylists in American English. Both novels are short by the standards of the literary novel.
