Going long where those previous narratives were almost cruelly terse, “All That Is” gobbles the whole arc of a man’s lifetime as its subject, opening near the end of World War II, when Philip Bowman is a junior naval officer on a ship bound for Japan. Over the next several decades, we see him married and divorced, and watch him make his way as a book editor at a literary publishing house in New York. Other romances follow, the most significant one curdled by a cruel betrayal that Bowman ultimately repays with commensurate viciousness. Friends fall away, new friendships are forged, houses are bought and sold, parents die, and one by one the bonds of love and attachment weaken and fade. In one of our last glimpses of Bowman — he’s just old enough to be thinking hard about death — he’s pondering a trip back to the Pacific, last seen from a warship’s deck, “where the only daring part of his life lay.” The clock ticks in this book too, but not so audibly, and sometimes not at all.

Set beside the flyboys and climbers of Salter’s previous books, Bowman looks unremarkable, a loner with a lowercase life and a profession to match: “The power of the novel in the nation’s culture had weakened. It had happened gradually. It was something everyone recognized and ignored. All went on exactly as before, that was the beauty of it. The glory had faded but fresh faces kept appearing, wanting to be part of it, to be in publishing which had retained a suggestion of elegance like a pair of beautiful, bone-shined shoes owned by a bankrupt man.” Here, as always, this writer so at war with the obvious uncovers radiance in even the most melancholy circumstance, applying to it the same rigor he uses to scrutinize and dismiss any easy, conventional notions about heroism or the honorable life.

What redeems the otherwise ordinary Bowman — what gives him grace — are his unstinting capacity for watchfulness and his embrace of memory as a bulwark against oblivion. Supplying his own epigraph, Salter opens the novel with this note: “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.” Bowman insists at one point that he’s no writer, but, like the man who created him, he doesn’t miss much: “The first voice he ever knew, his mother’s, was beyond memory, but he could recall the bliss of being close to her as a child. He could remember his first schoolmates, the names of everyone, the classrooms, the teachers, the details of his own room at home — the life beyond reckoning, the life that had been opened to him and that he had owned.”

With his customary knack for scenes and characters chiseled with a stonecutter’s economy, Salter constructs Bowman’s world out of dozens of glistening miniatures and tossed-off portraits, each bristling with life. There are the troops at Tarawa, “slaughtered in enemy fire dense as bees,” and Bowman’s uncle, a New Jersey restaurant owner who “had taught himself to play the piano and would sit in happiness, drawn up close to the keyboard with his thick fingers, their backs richly haired, nimble on the keys.” There is an upper-crust London party that might have been drawn by Hogarth, where an “older woman with a nose as long as an index finger was eating greedily, and the man with her blew his nose in the linen napkin, a gentleman, then.” (Actually, the artist Salter most closely resembles is Degas, with his icy regard and discerning, sensual eye.) And while there is a generous amount of carnality, as might be expected from the author of “A Sport and a Pastime,” the sex is always lyrically economical and never ever laughable, except when it means to be: “They made love simply, straightforwardly — she saw the ceiling, he the sheets.”