James Salter - All That Is - and maybe more in The Book Book

I like to fall in love with authors. It helps if they are male. It doesn't happen very often.

But sometimes - -

I read some plot of Salter's book today. All That Is.

He falls in love with a woman who has a 16 yr old daughter. The woman becomes a real estate agent and sells him a house. He puts the house in both his and her names and she lives there all the time and he visits on weekends. it's on Long Island - sort of early Hampton-ish.

She takes up with a contractor - Piet Hanema-ish only he might not have a wife. She sued him for the house and wins it in court. Later he comes across the daughter who is now just grown up - twenty i believe her age is. He seduces her and takes her to Paris and shows her a good time.

He abandons the daughter in Paris with no money and she does not know the language.

Supposition is he has gotten even with the mother.

I'm not sure what i think of that. It leaves me kind of hanging. I listened to Salter read part of the book that i had already read on youtube. Now I see and hear him reading it as I read it. I read some of it last night in the middle of the night.

I thought as I went to sleep that discovering an author and giving yourself to him is like falling in love. You take him as he is. You give yourself to him as you are.

That was before I read the part about the betrayal and the revenge.

But I suppose nothing is different. It's too much like life. Too much like what we sometimes think of as love

Salter also has a rather rough couple of paragraphs about Jews. Maybe the paragraphs aren't rough. They are looking at Jews from the outside. They might even remind me of my own feelings. He described Jewesses - a word with a lot of s's for sure - as exotic and smart and attractive in ways I've seen Jewish males.

Then I remembered Salter was/is Jewish himself. He changed his name when he started writing so he could keep his writing life separate from his military life.

I like Salter. I've fallen in love with him.... maybe not completely but then I don't fall in love with anyone completely. I need to save something back. I need to save something back for when my lover sues me for the house.

I suppose I will finish the Salter book. I have skipped part of the first half of it. I can go back and pick it up. I don't know how he lost his first wife. I could see it coming. And then there are middle women too. I guess I'm glad he let the twenty year old go instead of living happily ever after with a much younger woman in the usual fictional trope.

What's a trope? A pattern? Figurative language - example Washington for the government. That's not what I meant. Though I might get by with it because no one else would know either.

I think I'll copy the Salter stuff into my prosebook - books book.

Here is a link - http://blogs.utexas.edu/culturalcompass/2013/04/18/salter-novels/

Go see what you think.

But remember. He's mine. I love him.

It might tell you what I fell in love with.