There is a moment early in the book when an aging man—Bowman's wife's grandfather—confronts his flailing son and takes stock of his own life. "He could hardly construct how he had gotten from there to here," Salter writes, and that, as much as anything, is the explanation of this book: reconstructing the "there to here," plotting the waypoints of a life—war, college, sex, love, marriage, divorce, death, heartbreak, joy, illness, betrayal, redemption—and drawing the reader along for the ride. This is the view from the summit of life's hill rather than midway up its flanks. It is a story told by someone looking backwards with the benefit of a lifetime of accumulated knowledge.

That's not to say it's overly nostalgic. That Bowman works in publishing is a testament to Salter's lifelong love affair with books, allowing a sort of elegy for a publishing world long vanished, but there is no insistence that the good old days were any better. For all his outward success, Bowman is not admirable in the way others of Salter's characters are. He is flawed, he longs for a fantasy life he will never achieve, he can be vindictive and deceptive, pedantic and condescending, and he struggles with what it is that he really wants.

In thinking about Bowman, I found myself recalling something Salter said during our lunch, a seemingly throwaway comment about an aging mechanic acquaintance of his and the nobility of competent people, the casual poetry of which has stayed with me. "Nobody is interested in that kind of life anymore, but it's touching when you see them," he said. "It's like a dog walking along the side of the highway. You say, 'Look at that, that's a brave dog. I wonder what's going to happen to him.'"

Bowman is, in some ways, a cautionary tale, but he is not unlikable. Of the kind of men he admires and is drawn to, Salter once wrote, "I like men who have known the best and worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip." These men have seen lows, but only because they aimed high. "It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords." It is this taking of the good with the bad that keeps Bowman sympathetic, the recognition that life retains its magic, for all that one is bruised by bad decisions, bad fortune, or bad sex.

And it's the travails wrought by sex and love that drive this book. That Salter loves women is undeniable, and he revels, graphically at times, in the sensuality of the act. (Suffice to say that when NPR recently posted an advance excerpt of All That Is on its website, they appended the following advisory: "This excerpt contains adult content that some readers may find offensive.") But there is also a hefty indulgence of male fantasy throughout. Men possessing women; young women, beautiful ones, going to bed with older men, routinely; and Bowman's need for women who put him on a pedestal, women who will make him feel whole, like a man.

In the slightly retrograde sexual politics, Salter seems like an emissary from another time, bearing messages across the decades about the constants—love, loss, ego, attraction, sex, adultery, and the cycling nature of all of the above—that impel his characters through their lives. And he is unparalleled in his ability to capture things like: the joy of beginning a love affair or the sad tawdriness of unwinding one; the satisfaction of finding something that feels right, even if it's not quite what you'd had in mind; and the power of our minds to see things as we'd wish them to be. Here's Salter describing Bowman's love of his young wife: "He loved her for not only what she was but what she might be, the idea that she might be otherwise did not occur to him or did not matter. Why would it occur? When you love you see a future according to your dreams."