I’m reading this novel, Light Years, by James Salter, a novelist known for his succinct, luminous prose and his explorations of desire and ambition. He wrote with the precision of Hemingway and the emotional acuity of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he carved out a space for his work in twentieth-century literature.
Light Years, one of his critically acclaimed works, traces the slow dissolution of a marriage over a number of years. It’s tone is crisp, moody, atmospheric, and at times disorienting because the omniscient narrator weaves in and out of the minds of characters with barely a signal to the reader.
Although the novel focuses on the married couple—Viri and Nedra—a scene that really wowed me is when one of their daughters, Danny, is “stricken” by desire and obsession for the first time.
Danny is with a friend when they run into Juan on the streets of NYC:
. . . He was twenty-three. From the first instant she was ready to forget her studies, her dog, her home. He paid no attention to her in that tribute which the stricken have learned to expect. She was too young, she knew, too middle-class; she was not interesting enough for him. She was wearing a coat she hated. She stared at the sidewalk and from time to time dared a glance to reaffirm a face that dazed her with its power . . . He radiated an energy which terrified her and drove all other thoughts from her mind.
“Who is that?” she asked afterwards.
“A friend of a friend.”
“What does he do?” Her questions were helpless, she was ashamed of them.
It’s not much, it’s a short scene among secondary characters and it leads into an eventual love affair between Danny and Juan, and the power of the writing stunned me. This sentence: “He paid no attention to her in that tribute which the stricken have learned to expect.” The word tribute, the word stricken, the word expect. Few sentences pack such authentic, visceral meaning.
Followed by her immediate angst, her self-conscious detail about her coat, her terror at this “face that dazed her with its power.”
And then: her helpless questions, which ashamed her, but she could not help herself.
Salter is a master: in those few sentences, I was Danny. I was there in that moment, I felt what she felt. I’m going to start using the word stricken more often in my writing.
