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Book Reviewed by:An extraordinary literary event, a major new novel by the PEN/Faulkner winner and acclaimed master: a sweeping, seductive, deeply moving story set in the years after World War II.
From his experiences as a naval officer in battles off Okinawa during World War II, Philip Bowman returns to America and finds a position as a book editor. It was a time when publishing was still a private affair - a scattered family of small houses here and in Europe - a time of gatherings in fabled apartments, parties into the night. It is a world in which to immerse himself, a world of intimate connections and surprising triumphs. But the deal that Philip cannot seem to close is love: one marriage goes bad; another fails to happen; and, finally, he meets a woman who enthralls, then betrays him, setting him on a course he could never have imagined for himself.
Written with Salter's signature economy of prose, All That Is fiercely, fluidly explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change: a dazzling, sometimes devastating labyrinth of love and ambition, of the small shocks and grand pleasures of being alive.
Despite its many merits though, the pillar on which this novel rests, Philip Bowman, remains a frustratingly opaque character. Protagonists don’t necessarily have to be good or bad for us to engage with them but they have to give us some reason to care. Bowman doesn’t. That we can still engage with the story regardless speaks volumes about Salter’s writing...continued
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
In All That Is, just after World War II, one of Bowman's good friends is so captivated by the village of Piermont, New York that he buys a house close to the water and watches the Hudson river flow by from his home. The town, in New York's Rockland County, is picturesquely framed by the Hudson river on one side and the Tallman Mountain State Park on the other.
These days Piermont, which is just a few miles south of the Tappan Zee bridge (one of the main connectors between New York City and New Jersey), is a fashionable village attracting yuppie visitors and artists, but not so long ago it was quite a depressed town. It had a manufacturing base and was home to the Continental Can Company in the 50s and a paper company, which shuttered ...
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