Another Salter novel featuring a young American man in France, traveling and hardly bothering with a means of income. In this case our hero, Rand, is traveling upwards, ascending the most difficult mountain faces of the French Alps. He has no money, or hardly any, beyond what comes from the odd illegal job or the women with whom he's sleeping. Possessions could not matter less to him; what he desires, mainly, is the climb.

In the morning he woke among peaks incredibly white against the muted sky. There is something greater than the life of the cities, greater than money and possessions; there is a manhood that can never be taken away. For this, one gives everything.

Comfort, he remarks elsewhere, kills.

For the climb, Rand will sacrifice all else. Certainly interpersonal relationships are well back in his concern. Not that he does not recognize and feel the camaraderie of the mountain climbing fraternity, at least those whose skills he respects - a small group that includes Cabot, his closest friend/competitor, but which does not seem to include most of the guides and climbers who come to Chamonix, the small French town at the base of the mountains. And he finds fame when he leads a difficult ascent in poor weather to rescue two climbers, taking a route up that was dismissed as too risky by the professional guides and official rescuers. But did he do that for selfless, or self-centered grandiose, reasons? Well, perhaps both.

While Rand comes off as heroic when he's conquering mountains, his relationships with women are anything but. The reader first sees this when Rand abruptly leaves his girlfriend in America to move to France. Salter slips in a little detail here that is telling:

He left behind some cardboard boxes filled with shoes, fishing equipment, and a handful of letters from an old girlfriend, born in Kauai, who had cut his palm one night and, to seal their love, raised it to her mouth and drunk the welt of blood.

Fall in love with Rand but don't expect much, it would appear.

In France he has relationships with a number of women, most importantly Catherin. She becomes pregnant, news which Rand reacts to with cold distaste. "I don't want to be tied down", he tells her. She promises him he can always do whatever he likes, but he is not placated.

[S]he would forget what she was saying now, her instincts as a woman would come out. That was what always happened.

The relationship ends.

The novel takes a sharp turn when Rand, on a dangerous solo climb, turns back before the summit and retreats, defeated. His confidence, his belief in his ability to cling to the side of the smoothest, most difficult piece of rock, is shattered. Without that, he is no good as a climber. And having thrown everything else aside, what is left to him?

Salter's prose, again, is terrifically good. Sharp and hard. A favorite passage is his description of English climbers:

There is a strain of English whose faces are somehow crude as if they were not worth finishing or touching with color. It was these sullen faces that filled the room…

British climbing had changed since the war. Once the province of university men, it had been invaded by the working class who cut their teeth on the rock of Scotland and Wales and then traveled everywhere, suspicious and unfriendly. They came from the blackened cities of England - Manchester, Leeds. To the mountains they brought the same qualities - toughness and cynicism - that let them survive in the slums. They had no credo, no code. They had bad teeth, bad manners, and one ambition: to conquer.

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Well-, and sometimes superlatively written, though the macho nihilism grew tiresome. I'll give the author some slack because he flew fighter jets in the Korean War. I won't grab him by the collar and try to shake the neck he risked. He knows whereof he speaks about rock face climbing -- which I find fascinating from a distance -- so this detailed account of that obsession made for a good yarn. ( )

Good novel about a 30-something guy obsessed with mountain climbing in American and Europe. ( )

“The smallest act took on immense dimensions” (142). This sums up Mr. Salter’s unique, compressed prose style. Too often lumped in with, say, Hemingway—no doubt on account of short, declarative sentences—Salter is in a class of his own. This is probably on par with [b:A Sport and a Pastime|114511|A Sport and a Pastime|James Salter|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1316729107s/114511.jpg|2488018], but neither reach the crown jewel of his repertoire, [b:Light Years|174622|Light Years|James Salter|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1374594784s/174622.jpg|2825318]. ( )

This book was beautifully written - I liked the style of writing. Easy to read, the prose flowed smoothly. This book is about Vernon Rand, the mountain climber and his drive to climb higher and climb solo. He has a friend/rival - Cabot - also driven to attain summits.

I was interested enough in these foreign peaks - for example, Mont Blanc - to do a little research on the internet so I learned some things I didn't know before. (Mainly I'm thinking - why California? Why France? Why not climb in Colorado??)

The main character is definitely not without flaws. He's not a likable fellow. Neither is Cabot. Rand has trouble with keeping or even wanting a steady relationship with a woman. It's all about the mountain, but even that relationship is difficult to maintain for the long term. A very melancholy book.

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