To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
-- Herman Melville
James Salter's great accomplishment in Solo Faces is that he matches, and sometimes exceeds, the magnitude of his enormous subject matter, through vivid characterizations.
While reading a novel about mountain climbing, I expected I would highlight excerpts about the act of scaling an ascent. And yes, Salter is a good writer, and those passages are harrowing, solidifying in my mind the resolution that I will never, EVER be a mountain climber. But I found myself more struck by descriptions like these:
"She already had a stiffness and hesitation that are part of middle age. Her attention was entirely on her feet. Only the humorous, graceful movements of her hands and her kerchief around her head made her seem youthful."
"He's a strange guy. He's like a searchlight. When he turns your way, he just dazzles you. Afterward, you're left in darkness, you might as well not be alive."
I'm not sure how this book would go over with women. His protagonist, Vernon Rand, has both a voracious sexual appetite and a gnawing misogyny at the core of his interactions with the female characters in the novel. "One woman is like another," he muses at one point. "Two are like another two. Once you begin there is no end." His interest, or "trust" in them, circles back to what is ultimately most important to him -- himself, and that he will somehow live on after his death, in the stories they tell of his accomplishments:
"For some reason he trusted only women and for each of them he assumed a somewhat different pose. They were the bearers of his story, scattered throughout the world."
Solo Faces is one of those books that is so well written, you almost forget you're reading it. For a writer, reading Salter is like taking a sip of cold water from a wellspring on top of a mountain. Yes, the mountains in this book are symbolic, just as the white whale is in Melville. However, this is no more a book about mountains than Moby Dick is a book about whales. In the end, this is a "mighty book" about characters who become real and who make the reader care about them, their choices, accomplishments, challenges and joys.
-- Herman Melville
James Salter's great accomplishment in Solo Faces is that he matches, and sometimes exceeds, the magnitude of his enormous subject matter, through vivid characterizations.
While reading a novel about mountain climbing, I expected I would highlight excerpts about the act of scaling an ascent. And yes, Salter is a good writer, and those passages are harrowing, solidifying in my mind the resolution that I will never, EVER be a mountain climber. But I found myself more struck by descriptions like these:
"She already had a stiffness and hesitation that are part of middle age. Her attention was entirely on her feet. Only the humorous, graceful movements of her hands and her kerchief around her head made her seem youthful."
"He's a strange guy. He's like a searchlight. When he turns your way, he just dazzles you. Afterward, you're left in darkness, you might as well not be alive."
I'm not sure how this book would go over with women. His protagonist, Vernon Rand, has both a voracious sexual appetite and a gnawing misogyny at the core of his interactions with the female characters in the novel. "One woman is like another," he muses at one point. "Two are like another two. Once you begin there is no end." His interest, or "trust" in them, circles back to what is ultimately most important to him -- himself, and that he will somehow live on after his death, in the stories they tell of his accomplishments:
"For some reason he trusted only women and for each of them he assumed a somewhat different pose. They were the bearers of his story, scattered throughout the world."
Solo Faces is one of those books that is so well written, you almost forget you're reading it. For a writer, reading Salter is like taking a sip of cold water from a wellspring on top of a mountain. Yes, the mountains in this book are symbolic, just as the white whale is in Melville. However, this is no more a book about mountains than Moby Dick is a book about whales. In the end, this is a "mighty book" about characters who become real and who make the reader care about them, their choices, accomplishments, challenges and joys.
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