In the years following the Second World War, New York must have seemed like the center of the universe. This was especially true in the world of publishing. A tight-knit group of small houses published early works by authors that now make up much of the American canon. It must have been a glorious time to be a part of it all. Into this world comes Philip Bowman, a young naval officer and a veteran of battles off Okinawa. Like many returning vets he drifts for a while until almost by accident he lands a job as an editor with a respected publisher of literary fiction.

All That Is tracks Bowman’s life from his years as a young editor through perhaps late-middle age. The novel consists of a series of small details, the “normal” things that make up a life: Bowman is married, divorced, buys a home and marks time in his life through a series of lovers. Friends come and go, he continues his work. There is very little traditional plot but that doesn’t distract from the work. Salter’s talent is in his ear and his descriptive sense. 

Salter’s prose is, as always, clean and plain in the best sense of the word. Snapshot sentences are beautifully grounded: “Sometimes there were publishing parties, the young women who longed to make a life out of it in their black dresses and glowing faces, girls who lived in small apartments with clothes on the bed and the photos from the summer curling.”

Unfortunately, deftly built sentences are not enough to make a successful novel. The excitement of the times doesn’t come through. Bowman, his coworkers, his friends and family come off as curiously bloodless. They seem to suffer from low affect, always polite and low-keyed. Perhaps this was the style in their milieu but there also must have been great conflict and clashing egos. This was the time of Mailer, Vidal, Jones … imagine editing those guys! Where is the hustle and noise of life in literary New York? It is difficult to accept Salter’s tranquilized characters. Bowman also seems to sleepwalk through his personal life. He seems to accept divorce, an ugly breakup, loneliness and the death of his mother with a kind of Zen calm, but with no hint of wisdom. He just goes along. A book that attempts to chronicle a life and times needs to be more generous. Historical events are barely alluded to. The Kennedy assassination is mentioned once, perhaps as a way to place us on the timeline, as is the Vietnam War. But Bowman’s reaction is so muted that we have no idea how he feels about these things. He exists in a bubble. We can scarcely tell the ‘40s from the ‘60s.

The last part of the novel, beginning with a chapter titled “Attractive Women” is especially disappointing. The lovers that pass through Bowman’s life lack depth. There is a beautiful description: a sad woman being refused another drink in a restaurant, but she’s a minor character from an earlier chapter and the scene goes nowhere. Scenes from an affair in Paris with a very young woman are beautifully nostalgic but that is, after all, low-hanging fruit. When Bowman abruptly leaves the woman, the daughter of a lover who had treated him badly, we’re left to wonder why. Is this milquetoast character capable of revenge? Or was he just bored? 

Other women drift in and out of Bowman’s life. They aren’t especially literary or even intelligent, strange considering the times and the place. Why does Bowman choose them? They are beautiful, and when Salter describes them we see that beauty, but only the physical. Don’t these women have souls? What motivated one to cheat him out of his house, another to leave him with a bare-bones explanation? We can only guess. 

The novel ends with the kind of summing up that this sort of story calls for: a meditation on death that is poignant and sad and a subtle nod toward feelings of regret and loneliness, all set down in beautiful, sparse prose. We wish that we had been allowed a deeper look into Philip Bowman’s life and times. 

Owen Hill is the author of two published novels, The Chandler Apartments (Creative Arts Books) and The Incredible Double (PM Press). His reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the East Bay Express. He is currently at work co-editing an annotated edition of Raymond Chandlers The Big Sleep. 

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