It’s no secret that young people in America and elsewhere in the first world are getting lonelier and lonelier. The term “loneliness epidemic” has become so common that it’s now a bit of a cliche.

The reasons we’ve been struck by this epidemic are many and varied. It’s far too simplistic to say that young people are lonelier because they read less. However, I do feel that this is one of the reasons that people are so lonely.

Going Numb

Instead of spending time with other people or reading, most citizens of the first world under the age of 40 now spend every moment of their free time distracting themselves from their loneliness with various forms of Internet-based entertainment. This not only doesn’t treat the root cause of the problem, it doesn’t even really treat the symptom.

Watching TikTok videos and the like is a treatment for loneliness in the same way that lidocaine is a treatment for a third-degree burn. It only provides a moment’s relief, the symptom is still there, just a bit further away, and you need more and more and more to get by.

The most commonly prescribed treatment for loneliness is to spend time with other humans — in-person. While this is certainly part of a healthy treatment regimen, it’s inadequate by itself.

The Two Types Of Loneliness

There are two types of loneliness. Surface-level loneliness and existential loneliness. Spending time with other humans can only treat surface-level loneliness. No matter how much time you spend with other people, however, it won’t treat your existential loneliness. You’ll still be alone within your own consciousness. In fact, spending time with the wrong people—those who quite obviously see the world very differently—can actually make existential loneliness worse.

Existential loneliness, from which surface-level loneliness metastasizes, is far harder to treat and perhaps impossible to cure. In fact, there’s no treatment for it in the physical world, nor is such a treatment even possible.

The Only Treatment

The only possible treatment for existential loneliness is to share your consciousness with someone. But this is impossible in the “real” world, and by extension impossible in nonfiction books anchored in the real world.

Reading fiction is the only way you can share your consciousness with someone and overcome existential loneliness. Fiction puts the character’s consciousness on the page, which becomes your consciousness when you read the book and its words become your thoughts. For this to happen, you need to open your mind to an alternate reality in which sharing consciousnesses is possible — which is what readers are doing when they dive into a work of fiction.

The Shortcomings Of Nonfiction

Nonfiction, like bad fiction, is written for an audience to understand. It’s the paper equivalent of a speech or campfire story by the author. This means that the author’s thoughts are translated into the words they think will get across the necessary information as clearly and forcefully as possible. To make it sound a bit less intellectual — nonfiction comes from the mouth, while fiction comes from the heart.

Of course, fiction can include such overt and clearly stated messages from the author. This, put simply, is the definition of pretentiousness. Pretentiousness is so detested by literary readers, myself included, because it shatters the fictional world by making the work feel like a lecture.

Attempts to Bridge the Gap

Creative nonfiction attempts to find a solution to these shortcomings through the use of fictional devices. But is creative nonfiction really nonfiction?

Take literary journalism, for example. If the author is acting in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise because they want to create a good story or they’re making up the thoughts of real-life characters… well, that certainly sounds like the creation of fictional stories to me.

The Prognosis

It certainly doesn’t seem like people will start putting down their smartphones and picking up literature en masse. Realistically, there’s no reason to believe that the dual trends of increased screen time and reducing reading time will do anything but accelerate. However, there will always be readers because literature will always offer something that can’t be found anywhere else.

A Sacred Calling

If there will always be readers, there always needs to be books to treat them. There are a finite number of great books in the world. An avid reader could get through them in a couple of years. What would they do then, without more books entering the world, books that offer the possibility of escaping the deadliest strain of loneliness?

This is the best reason I can find to keep writing in an era where literature doesn’t even have a place in mainstream American culture. If I can help just one reader feel less alone, the drudgery and pain of writing fiction is not for naught. This is a purpose every fiction writer can fall back on. 

James Salter’s ouevre is underrated as a whole, especially A Sport and a Pastime. His 1975 work, Light Years, is also a worthy inclusion in this series, perhaps even more so than A Sport and a Pastime. While the latter has become a cult classic among writers and avid literary readers, the former is still far more obscure.

Capturing the Flow of Life

Light Years isn’t quite at the level of A Sport and a Pastime. This is primarily because its prose isn’t quite as beautiful.Of course, the book is still full of stunning passages like this:

“Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.
And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.”

However, there are more grasps at greatness that come up empty-handed:

“But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.”

Though its prose might not be quite as gorgeous, the characters are far stronger. The protagonists, Nedra and Viri, feel perfectly true to the sort of New England bourgeoisie whose lifestyle they represent.

In contrast, A Sport and a Pastime’s main characters are largely imagined by a narrator who stays out of focus himself.

It’s in the flow of Nedra and Viri’s lives (to put it technically, how Salter develops these characters through the book) that Light Years is truly remarkable. Speaking from experience, it’s incredibly difficult to portray how people slowly change through many years in a book of a few hundred pages. Salter not only manages to do this, he portrays Nedra and Viri’s gradual resignation to ordinariness with a sort of elegiac beauty that lifts the book above the sort of “kitchen-sink realism” often employed to tell such stories.

Just How Underappreciated Is Light Years?

Light Years deserves acclaim, and it hasn’t received its just due. But just how underappreciated is it?

As with A Sport and a Pastime, I’ll compare Light Year‘s metrics with the most acclaimed literary novel of the year so we can get an idea of just how underrated the book really is. To my knowledge, the benchmark for 1975 is E.L. Doctorow’s classic Ragtime.

Ragtime, despite being widely regarded as a great novel, is only the 59,000th (roughly) best-selling book on Amazon. Light Years is ranked lower, of course, though not quite as much lower as I thought (roughly 78,000th). The two books also have relatively similar monthly search volumes.

While Ragtime may not sell an order of magnitude more copies than Light Years, it is far more widely acclaimed. It was included in both the Modern Library’s and Time’s lists of the 100 best English-language novels. While A Sport and a Pastime can be found in the Time list, Light Years was overlooked in both publications.

The library listings in WorldCat further underscore the difference in acclaim. Ragtime can be found in 4,184 libraries world-wide at the time of writing, while Light Years is only in a mere 863 collections.

Final Thoughts

Light Years is unmissable for any reader that loves beautiful prose. I wouldn’t quite say it’s unmissable, period, like A Sport and a Pastime. If you can only afford one Salter book and you’re stuck between these two, take the latter. However, if you’ve enjoyed A Sport and a Pastime and you want more, look no further than Light Years.

James Salter’s 1967 masterpiece A Sport and a Pastime might just be the quintessential underappreciated novel: it received critical acclaim when it was first released from the few critics who bothered to review it, barely sold any copies, and slowly became a cult novel among writers and avid literary readers.

Salter, who became a cult writer later in life largely through this novel, said it was the only one of his books that came close to living up to his standards. When you keep in mind that he won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Dusk and Other Stories and had both Solo Faces and Light Years included in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, the central place of A Sport and a Pastime in Salter’s oeuvre comes into focus.

Luminous Style

Salter writes in an elegant and concise prose style that flows through the book in the way that time flows through a life. Each sentence aspires to the sublime, there are no throwaway lines. As great books must, A Sport and a Pastime opens with an unforgettable passage: “September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again. It is being replenished.”

This eternal style would make the familiar plot almost beside the point – if not for its intriguing structure. The subject of the book is an ephemeral love affair between an American boy of 20 and an 18-year old French girl. The narrator is an acquaintance of the couple who freely admits he’s fabricating most of the scenes.

Why Always Love Stories?

His jealously of the boy is palpable through the detailed sex scenes that fill the majority of the book. This makes A Sport and a Pastime a sort of meta love story without the irritating contrivances found in postmodern literature. If the book asks a question of its reader, it would be “Why are people compelled to tell love stories?”

This brief book leaves the question for the reader to answer, the narrator never really provides his reasons. Instead, the book comes to a shattering end that feels inevitable — beautiful, ephemeral love affairs (at least in fiction) can never have a happy ending. Read it in an afternoon, and you’ll be crying over your dinner.

The Second Order Of Greatness

While A Sport and a Pastime is a masterpiece, it doesn’t quite reach the very highest level of greatness. This partially explains why it sells at roughly 3% of the rate of 1967’s most popular and influential literary novel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years Of Solitude. But is A Sport and a Pastime really 1/33rd the novel?

Everyone will tell you to read Marquez’s book, and they’re certainly right. However, those few that would recommend A Sport and a Pastime are opening the door to a reading experience that many will find no less moving than 100 Years Of Solitude. While Salter’s book might not be one of the iconic works of a major literary movement, it is one of the all-time great erotic novels.

When every sentence reaches for the sublime, it’s inevitable that (even in a masterpiece) a small percentage will miss and fall into pretentiousness and contrivance. E.g. “One is an angel, at least for betrayal.” A fresh bit of figurative language (which is the substance of Salter’s prose) resonates with the reader when it hits, and rings hollow when it doesn’t.

That these hollow rings disrupted the beautiful melody of Salter’s work was the primary criticism throughout his career, and it’s one of the few legitimate gripes a discerning reader can have about his oeuvre. In A Sport and a Pastime, however, these missed notes are lost in a sublime symphony.

Final Thoughts

If you’re tired of dry, ideologically-driven fiction and want to read a beautifully sensual book, you’d struggle to do better than A Sport and a Pastime. If you like it, check out other Salter works mentioned above. At least one more will likely be discussed in this series, possibly very soon.