Author James Salter brought out All That Is in 2013 and in it he traces protagonist Philip Bowman’s relationship history. Bowman pursues and is pursued by a series of beautiful, alluring women from his youth and into his late middle age. In the period between World War II, in which Bowman serves in the U.S. Navy, through and past the wrenching end of the Vietnam War, Salter’s presentation of his hero’s parade of fidelity and infidelity is by turns emotionally engaging and shocking, but unfailingly vivid.
We meet Phil Bowman as a very young but well-respected officer on a ship in the Pacific, as the Allies prepare to invade Okinawa. He comes home with a new and deeper perspective, having lived through the carnage and destruction at sea. He enters the highly competitive publishing field in New York and soon proves a valuable asset to his employer. Well-known events pop up as background: the 1950s prosperity and confidence, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, roiling social changes. Bowman is dazzled by a Virginia heiress and marries her, and the almost universal opinion is that the marriage can’t last. It doesn’t. Theirs is an amicable separation and divorce. Subsequent relationships don’t often share that characteristic.
Bowman at times proves a rather aloof partner after the first blush of romance fades. And through it all, we witness all levels of society, and are reminded throughout that the rich get what they want and treat others with disdain and customary contempt. Women raise their voices and push for liberating reforms, but these trends play a secondary role, behind Bowman’s exploits with women. He has one rather passionate relationship with a woman by whom he is utterly starstruck; she betrays and nearly ruins him financially. This event and its aftermath form the main nexus of the plot.
The hero serves as witness to social changes, even if they don’t affect him directly very often. Salter’s descriptions vary between uncannily beautiful and workmanlike. Character motivations strike as deeply true, and action has a gratifying inevitability. We are treated to numerous brief departures from the main course of action: generally these are background sketches of a minor character whom we don’t encounter again. They serve to round out the narrative, add color and depth, showing how social and sometimes insular the New York publishing world was at that time.
I found All That Is quite well-crafted but only moderate in its rewards. I’ve seen deeper and higher praise for it from media outlets, but it doesn’t dazzle me that way. This is not written to highlight arcane truths or to commemorate lofty ideals; its focus on the sexual exploits of its hero, and how he affects and treats his partners detracts from any such loftier ambition.
Renowned British novelist John Fowles published Daniel Martin in 1977, and has said that it is his favorite of his novels (in a 1986 interview with Professor Emerita Susan Onega of the University of Zaragoza: Jonathan, Richard, “Maramarietta.com, 2025, https://www.maramarietta.com/the-arts/fiction/john-fowles/, retrieved June 9, 2025). It’s a challenging work of fiction, and shows Fowles to be a master of the form. It will reward readers who love sophisticated conversation; erudite analyses of aesthetics and psychology; inward dialogue; and unorthodox approaches to writing fiction.
Dan Martin is a British screenwriter who in the 1970s has achieved worldly success in Hollywood. He’s attended Oxford University, been married and divorced, has a grown daughter, and is in a relationship with a young actress about his daughter’s age. A man with whom he attended Oxford (and is now a don) has fallen deathly ill and summons him from America because he wants to see Martin before he dies.
The meeting proceeds but events take a sudden shocking turn. As a result Dan vaults into a bout of soul searching; he realizes he has been pursuing the wrong things, including his partners, in his life, and now has a clear vision of what, and whom, he wants to pursue.
And this in broad strokes is the plot of the novel. But recounting the plot does nothing to establish in the prospective reader’s mind the depth of Dan’s yearning, nor of the erudition with which he pursues his goals. There is a lot of give and take, a lot of conversational thrusting and parrying with his chosen lover/wife/partner to be.
Along with deep and sometimes persuasive discussions of society and philosophy in England and America, we encounter Fowles’s playing with the narrative: he switches from third person to first person in an effort, I think, to capture Dan’s approach to his writing, and his view of himself. The book is full of philosophical asides, but they’re always in service to the protagonist’s thinking at the moment.
The actors in Atavists, a set of 14 madcap stories from Lydia Millet, spout their harebrained opinions, where social media-connected teens of Gen Z and Millennials speak at cross-purposes, summarily correct each other’s political correctness, and dream trendy dreams and visualize leveraging them into celebrity and big paydays. Millet’s tone and content blend to produce frothy pitch-perfect comedy, while beneath it roil the real and apparently intractable 21st Century challenges.
The author weaves brief episodes in the lives of a few families and their contacts — friends, frenemies, exes, coworkers — into a single overarching plot that addresses questions and gives the reader closure. Or at least a hint at closure.
I celebrate Millet’s ear for au courant patter and her unerring feel for the zeitgeist currently plaguing America. Characters pay close attention to their favored online platforms, combing through posts to follow, accuse, disparage, or glorify whomever might be in the crosshairs. They ponder the subjects and viewpoints they might use to influence followers, and how to monetize them. Or they want their trendy, buzzword-filled talking points to climb the best-seller list, thus proving their correctitude, and granting access to the hottest restaurants and resorts.
The author’s petard becomes crowded with all the hoisting. I love the fun she pokes at almost everything she sees, and I admire her tangential acknowledgement of the real issues facing the country, the economy, and the planet. Part of her design is to highlight the ineffectual lip service these characters pay to this toxic mix — their attitude, almost without exception — is to cite the issue in didactic terms to prove their superior correctness, and let it go at that.
Pick up Atavists and live alongside these modern-day players; they’re self-absorbed, glib, and out for ol’ #1, but some of them achieve wisdom, perspective, or perform a worthwhile charitable role. Millet is at the absolute forefront of current novelists writing in English, one of my very favorites. She shows a light touch with the fabulous foibles and an unblinking way with the cunning self-interest of her cast. Take and enjoy!
Wrenching life episodes told in plain language; human urges and inadequacies portrayed perfectly; the long-term inescapable consequences of life decisions—all these are on display in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s felicitous and big-hearted latest novel, Theft. Set in the author’s native Tanzania, the book takes up the lives of a couple of extended families, and explores themes of love, betrayal, class oppression, and international economics. It all seems so effortless, and it concludes in such a balanced and generous way. It’s quite artful and unreservedly recommended.
The events of Theft depend on complex family relationships, and they reflect a well-entrenched, if quirky, ethos. This culture reflects an openness to relatives in need, but the need arises from outmoded and frequently misanthropic attitudes. Young people are ostracized—shunted off into service to unfriendly relations and deprived of education—for the offense of having miscreant or unorthodox parents. Tourists to the area show off their wealth and their disregard for local customs and mores. This book contains an unveiled indictment of the systems that result in such abuses.
Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, composes in plain-spoken, unassuming language; he relies on it to carry the weight of the events which sometimes wreak havoc on his characters’ lives, which it does beautifully. These characters represent the full range of personalities—greed, prejudice, anger, generosity, respectfulness, acceptance—and the author unfailingly presents them as arising from the everyday human business of surviving. The tone is very effective; it’s all superb in his hands.
Generous, deceptively deep, and rewarding, this novel is well worth taking up.
Subtitle: The Politics of the Enlightenment and the American Founding
Darren Staloff, Ph.D., a historian at the University of Florida, considers three prominent Founding Fathers in Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson. He takes up each with reference to their role in the founding of the United States, and with reference to each other. Using their own writings and extensive quotes from contemporary and later sources, he paints an extensive and even-handed portrait of each. Steeped in the thought and politics of the time, these in-depth sketches immerse the reader in the personality and the grand achievement of each. They will round out your understanding of each in grand if unblinking style.
In grossly broad strokes, mainstream Enlightenment thought rejected any appeal to the supernatural or divine revelation. This trend brought into common thought a disenchantment with the idea that the world was run by force of some supreme being, and contemplated instead, the natural forces which one could observe and test.
Continuing broadly, Hamilton used a superior mind and indefatigable energy to push through his vision of a strong central authority, with a central bank, a very active commercial market, and government investment in infrastructure. In his view these would together generate wealth and plenty for the new nation. This was at a time when the new country was overwhelmingly agrarian in nature, both in output and civic vision. Obviously his program ultimately carried the day.
Adams was a brilliant, sometimes prickly, always vain but honest statesman and politician, whose vision for the new Constitution was enacted in its entirety. I believe that any sharing of this credit, by any other contemporary thinker or Founding Father is illusory, and simple myth-building. Plain wrong.
Jefferson’s gift for lofty language created a grand American myth; his phrasing has inspired foreign revolutionary zealots and American schoolchildren alike. His presidency failed, however: the Embargo Act plunged the new nation into its first deep depression, and produced none of the desired results of projecting nascent American power internationally. In addition, his questionable parochiality about the slavery question, and his hare-brained scheme for solving it did nothing to prevent or forestall the bloody sectional conflict to come. In fact, it helped assure that the conflict would come.
As a history of the period, and three of its principal and most influential actors, this book is thorough and balanced — excellent.
Widely admired author Emma Donoghue manages to capture some version of fin desiècle zeitgeist while also spinning a suspenseful action narrative in The Paris Express. She sets her scene in an actual 1895 out-of-control express train that crashes into the Montparnasse station, and assembles within it a cast of historical figures, (some of whom were actually passengers on the wreck). This clever device gathers together key figures who represent the coming train wreck that is the 20th Century. It’s a bravura performance; I recommend it for its intelligence, its respect for its readers, and not least for its breathless pacing.
A national railway express leaves Granville on the Normandy coast bound for Paris, and its passengers include a handful of deputies, or representatives, of the Orne Department of France. The author also calls “all aboard” to scientists, prominent engineers and captains of industry, and literary and artistic lights of the period, and a very angry young anarchist with a bomb. Donoghue names and clearly identifies these souls in the novel. The author mounts an elaborate, nail-biting race against death, in a highly diverting, and very well-organized novel.
Distinguished author Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin, Thirteen Ways of Looking, among many others) takes up the story of an enigmatic seeker of sense and connection in our fractured modern world. In describing his hero, Conway, he achieves such subtle effects that I felt the need to go back and reread his early descriptions: a man with a focus on something so distant as to remove him from his current surroundings; his calmness and non-committal approach and way of speaking; an unwillingness to display or discuss his inner self. This introduction indicates we’re unmistakably in the hands of an accomplished master of fiction.
Conway directs the repair of undersea cables which house the fiber optic filaments which form the infrastructure of the internet. We view his story from the first-person narrative of Fennell, a journalist with a debilitating, haunting history. He’s left the scourge of alcoholism behind as he boards Conway’s ship (at p. 29 of the hardcover edition): “I, too, have known those sorts of days when I have put on the Prufrock smile when really all I had was the remnants of a wrecked life. ¶ But I am getting ahead of myself. I was still, at the time, eager to dwell on the story of a repair.”
McCann goes to some trouble to equate the internal workings of this ocean-going vessel with the organic internal functions of humans: after introducing the ship’s engine room crew (p. 75): “They moved among the propulsion engines, the water pipes, the boilers, the generator, the filters, the fuel strainers. There was something human about it too: the mysterious workings of the viscera, the liver, the kidneys, the heart.” And two pages later, he looks at a cross section of cable, surprised that they run parallel in perfect concentric circles — no twisting. “At the inner core, protected by several layers, lay the glass tubes. The conduits of the light. The xylem and phloem.” Thus the cable parallels the internal conduits of plants which carry water and nutrients back and forth.
With a faint Ishmael-and-Ahab echo we sail along the west coast of Africa, hunting a break in an undersea cable. Conway worries about Fennell, who is a freelance journalist, and keeps him at a distance. He views him as an interloper who worrisomely seeks to publicize — what? Conway’s own history features heart-rending ruptures, and a murky past he wishes to keep hidden. At length Conway, with a singular personal approach, vandalizes a cable beneath the Mediterranean, near Alexandria. It turns out that there are dummy devices — decoys, or dress rehearsals, maybe, anchored to submerged cables all around Europe and the Middle East. We are left in the dark about these mysterious sunken packs; did Conway install them, as seems quite likely?
In his Epilogue, McCann encapsulates one feature of modern times with beautiful, blunt brevity (p. 218): “Nobody could quite understand why the plot would be so intricately counterfeit, and why someone would go to the great difficulty of diving all that way just to hide something that was likely never to be seen. It triggered speculation across the internet: everyone with an opinion, of course, the obscene certainty of our days.”
These personal and multinational energies drive Twist’s narrative. McCann brings us along with a style that propels, but reveals nothing that would soften or dull the drama inherent. Even as Conway seeks an elusive undersea rupture to repair, he and the great love of his life have rent themselves asunder, and neither we nor Fennell can really tell the depth of Conway’s loss or loneliness.
There are plain lessons here, and it doesn’t take a deep reader to find them: the internet provides the infrastructure that assures “the obscene certainty of our days”; there is not a square inch of the planet that doesn’t bear the imprint of humankind’s traditional effluent industries; there’s no telling what another person thinks, or suffers, or desires. In sober reality, Fennell realizes an ultimate, concluding truth: “Mine has been a lifetime of dropped connections.”
It’s a sombre book, built around a high-stakes adventure story; it reflects sombre realities, but I would never dream of discouraging you to pick it up, dear reader. It’s done in a terse, muscular style, with McCann’s assured artistry. It will encourage your mature reflections, and impress you with the author’s awesome powers. McCann is by acclamation one of the front rank of novelists writing in English today.
Colum McCann’s first person narrator in Songdogs, named Conor, goes on a quest to understand his parents and perhaps find his long-estranged mother. This trip is not trivial in terms of miles covered — it takes him from hot, dusty Mexican towns, to a forest ranger lookout above the tree line in Idaho, to his windswept native Ireland — nor is it lacking for vivid colors, diverting characters, or a discussion of the long-standing grievances between his parents. His trek is absorbing, at times frustrating, but finally touching as reunited father and son gently spar, one generation against the other, and come to easy terms with each other.
Conor, in his early 20s, travels with a monstrous backpack in a passive, desultory way, and finally arrives at his father’s home in a small town in western Ireland. He surprises him by showing up, and the main current-day narrative kicks off. This story, as Conor tells it, becomes the central thrust of the novel, almost as if by default. Conor vividly remembers his mother, a captivating señorita from a sun-blasted town in eastern Mexico. Michael, Conor’s father, cut a swath through the remote town after mustering our from the war, and settled down with 19 year-old Juanita.
The narrative thus follows two time lines, one current, and one in the past. In the present-day story Conor finds Michael, who now lives a diminished, alienated life — it’s squalid: he neglects his hygiene, doesn’t do laundry, or pay any attention to the keeping his house. Their reuniting doesn’t spark any dramatic changes, but reacquaintance results in a subtle evolution between the two, where hard truths are acknowledged, and new understandings bloom.
This novel contains the vividly personal language of the questing youth. It contrasts sharply with the received platitudinal wisdom spouted by the hermit-like father. Don’t conclude that this is a depressing read; it’s way too vivid and plotted far too cleverly. It has as its core a classic human story of a family splintered by strong personalties and faded dreams. To catch an early example of McCann’s undeniable gifts, Songdogs serves beautifully.
Colson Whitehead takes us on an unforgettable ride in The Underground Railroad. He displays the horrific cruelty endemic to the America's Peculiar Institution, and shows how it and violent oppression ruled the relationship between blacks and whites during the first half of the 19th Century. Never ending spirals of hope and defeat put these rails on a roller coaster; it’s a vivid, gritty, honest, and ultimately awe-inspiring travail.
We witness the life-and-death flight of Cora, a Georgia slave girl, who crosses the threshold of womanhood just as the story unfolds. Hers, of course, is a harrowing tale; she escapes her bonds and for a time believes herself free, only to fall into the clutches of the authorities again. This sequence holds our attention and dashes our hopes on multiple occasions. Through it all Whitehead keeps America’s violent, sneering racism front and center.
The author surprised me by employing his title—a well-established term in American history—in a literal sense. But this playful (?) use allows him a series of episodes in which our fugitives struggle with hopelessness in utter darkness, unsure at times if they are even traveling in the right direction.
Whitehead draws out his climactic events superbly, while drawing in his readers. This is a fine adventure: we live and die with each twist of the plot. The author presents a textbook example of a suspenseful, harrowing chase while instructing us in the history of escaped slaves and the settlements in which they began their new lives. A rewarding read in more ways than one.
In his novella Loom in the Loft, Jay Black presents the bildungsroman of a young but precocious boy n the Canadian province of Ontario who comes under the spell of a beautiful neighbor woman. This calculating person takes advantage of his innocence and through no effort of her own, reaps a windfall far greater than she could ever have imagined—or deserved. It’s a spare but promising piece from a writer whose poems in English and French have won multiple awards.
Protagonist Drew is a pubescent lad, tall for his age and sophisticated beyond his years, whom a 30 year-old neighbor woman takes advantage of. In exchange for initiating him she works him hard, cooking, cleaning, doing the yardwork, helping with her weaving business, and running errands. (Please don’t expect anything explicit or pointedly titillating here; intimate events are handled very obliquely.) Another neighbor, a nonagenarian widow, adds tension in a surprising twist, and Drew’s life—and the novella—gain momentum and intrigue.
I’ve indicated the piece is spare; the prose is clean and serviceable—I appreciate Black’s straightforward approach. He adds depth and a bit of color to his main character, since his interests and actions are just what they should be. Or nearly so. I could have done with slightly more building-up of his sophistication and worldly wisdom, but this only counts as a quibble. Making him two or three years older would have done the trick, for me. The author also features a faint touch of metafiction, which is an ambitious stroke for this piece, and it feels unnecessary. Overall, though, Black paces his story well, withholds the right details when he needs to, and portrays his characters’ faults and virtues with a gifted writer’s instinct.
On balance, this is an enjoyable fiction that surprises with its well-built momentum; its virtues far outweigh its meager flaws and augur well for this writer’s future work.
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