Description
The discussion topics, author biography, and bibliography that follow are meant to enhance your group's reading of James Salter's Light Years. We hope that they will provide you with new ways of looking at--and talking about--a novel that has engrossed readers since its original publication in 1975 and that has contributed to its author's reputation as one of the most radiant prose stylists at work in the English language. Even the most cursory reading of this book makes it clear that Salter is also a supernaturally acute observer of the subatomic fields that flicker between men and women as they fall in and out of love. He is a novelist with the unblinking gaze of a scientist.
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This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, <i>Light Years</i> is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness—and then felt compelled to destroy it.
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