"All That Is" by James Salter; Knopf (304 pages, $26.95)

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Before becoming a full-time writer, 87-year-old James Salter was a fighter pilot, and he has written often and well about flying.

"All That Is," Salter's first full-length novel in more than 30 years, isn't ostensibly about flying at all, even if its protagonist does a brief stint in a plane toward the end of World War II. But the experience of reading this book is akin to one's panoramic view, when aloft and moving fast. You can see a lot, albeit briefly and often not very well.

"All That Is" covers 40-odd years - from the Okinawa campaign in 1945 through the mid-1980s in New York City - in the life of Philip Bowman, who stumbles into a job with a small publishing house and remains there as a book editor.

We're told at one point that Bowman "loved his work," but despite some gossipy table talk about books, we don't get much sense of how Bowman spends his days. "All That Is" focuses instead on what happens in the evenings and on the weekends, especially in Bowman's relations with women.

None of these women are very well defined, and Bowman's relations with each of them revolve around sex - vividly described, from the male point of view. Women tend to be "drawn" toward certain types of men; that verb and this formulation - fatalistic and reductive - are repeated, as is the threadbare pattern in Bowman's love life.

All but one of Bowman's relationships begins through a chance encounter - in a bar, at a party, in a taxi or in a train station. They end abruptly, often through unconvincing plot twists or in abstract phrases like this: "It was slipping away and he could not stop it. They were not going to marry."

Salter's other characters - this novel is stuffed with them - are similarly thin. But frustrating as that can be for a reader, it's also Salter's point. We drift through life, this novel suggests, without ever really getting to know those around us. And no matter how intimate or vivid certain moments and encounters may be, none of them last.

"I don't think you ever really know anybody," one of Bowman's lovers tells him. "You could not know someone else all of the time," Bowman himself reflects. "She had never really told him all she knew," Bowman suspects of his mother.

Such passages are all the more striking because Salter unspools this novel through a nearly omniscient narrator, who presumably could fill in the gaps - and who makes frequently seamless transitions from the perspective of one character to another.

This narrative freedom allows us glimpses - often no more than a paragraph or a page - inside the minds of minor players, who take their brief turn on Salter's stage and then disappear into the wings.

Some of these cameos - including those featuring a Greek gambler, a Manhattan bookseller, a Swedish publisher and a bank teller - are beautifully done miniatures, which simultaneously tell us about a life and remind us of how little of any life we'll ever truly know.

Salter similarly can be good in describing a scene; there's an incisive set piece involving a Christmas party in Virginia horse country - "Anglo, privileged, and inbred" - and an evocative, two-paragraph description of a tired but homey South Carolina town that fully captures a vanishing corner of an older South.

The net effect - of Bowman's relationships and the novel's many thumbnail sketches - is of a collection of short stories, of varying quality.

Like Bowman - who knows he is missing "a tangible center in life around which things could form and find a place," these loosely joined pieces don't always hang together. But as Salter's title intimates, such flitting and ephemeral images may be all there is - for Bowman, Salter and his readers.

Mike Fischer is a Milwaukee writer and lawyer.

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