Nedra

Notes on Nedra.

Nedra is the wife at the center of James Salter's Light Years, and Salter gives her something rare in fiction about marriage: he lets her be radiant on her own terms, not only in relation to anyone else's need of her. The house she keeps with Viri fills with dinners and daughters and a river that runs behind the property like a promise, and Salter writes all of it in a late, gold light, the kind that makes you suspect, even in the happiest chapters, that the book is already grieving something it hasn't lost yet.