All That Is

The novel opens during World War II as a naval ship carrying fifteen hundred men sails toward Okinawa in the final stages of the Pacific war. Lieutenant junior grade Philip Bowman, the navigation and lookout officer, stands on deck at dawn with his cabinmate, Kimmel, a skinny, irreverent man with a playboy's charm. When the first kamikaze attacks strike, Kimmel jumps overboard, believing the ammunition magazine has been hit. He is rescued twice by destroyers that are themselves destroyed and ends up in a naval hospital, becoming a kind of legend. After the war ends, Bowman goes ashore at Yokohama and walks through block after block of scorched foundations.

Bowman returns to Summit, New Jersey, to his mother, Beatrice, and his uncle Frank and aunt Dorothy. Frank, who runs a restaurant called the Fiori, has served as a surrogate father since Bowman's own father abandoned the family when Bowman was two. Bowman applies to Harvard, is initially rejected, writes a persuasive appeal, and enrolls in fall 1946. His roommate, Malcolm Pearson, becomes a lasting friend. After graduating, Bowman fails to land a newspaper job and drifts into publishing. Robert Baum, publisher of the literary house Braden and Baum, hires him as a manuscript reader. Baum is a Jewish German American who served in combat and vowed afterward never to be afraid of anything again. He runs the firm with the influence of his wife, Diana, a writer for a liberal magazine who becomes a significant literary figure. Bowman rises quickly to editor and befriends his colleague Neil Eddins, a mannerly southerner obsessed with women and literature.

On St. Patrick's Day in a crowded bar, Bowman sees Vivian Amussen, a blond, twenty-year-old woman from the privileged horse country of Middleburg, Virginia. Her father, George Amussen, is an elegant, reserved figure; her mother, Caroline, began drinking heavily after the marriage soured, and the couple divorced. Bowman falls deeply in love. They begin a courtship of letters and visits and sleep together for the first time at a friend's apartment. He brings Vivian to meet Beatrice, who is struck by her beauty but privately feels she has no soul. Over lunch, Amussen tells Bowman he cannot bless the marriage but will not stand in Vivian's way. They marry in Virginia. Beatrice weeps at the church, feeling she has lost her son.

The couple settles on Tenth Street in New York. Vivian is indifferent to housekeeping, and their intellectual common ground proves thin. Their tensions deepen: After a dinner at the Baums' where a controversial manuscript is discussed, Vivian refuses his advances without explanation.

On a business trip to London with Baum, Bowman attends a costume party hosted by Bernard Wiberg, a prominent publisher. There he meets Enid Armour, a beautiful woman from Cape Town estranged from her husband. They begin an affair that leaves Bowman feeling transformed. Meanwhile, from Maryland, where she is caring for her mother after a stroke, Vivian writes Bowman a letter of separation. She begins "Dear Philip" instead of her usual "Dearest Philip" and explains they have been going their own way without much in common. She asks for three thousand dollars and no alimony. Bowman is devastated but recognizes she was right.

Bowman and Enid travel to Spain, where they witness flamenco in Seville and visit Granada. He imagines a life with her but senses an uncertainty he cannot resolve. They never marry; she remains in London, tied by some obligation to her husband. Their connection sustains itself through letters but gradually fades. Back at the office one autumn day, the news arrives: President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.

In a parallel storyline, Eddins falls in love with Dena, a spirited Texan separated from her husband, a poet named Vernon Beseler. She has a young son, Leon, and Eddins becomes the boy's father in all but name. They live in a small house in Piermont, a factory town on the Hudson. Then Dena and Leon board a train to Texas to visit her parents. Past Buffalo, around one in the morning, an electrical fire breaks out in their car. By the time the train is stopped, seven passengers have died from asphyxiation, including Dena and Leon. Eddins is shattered. He leaves Braden and Baum for a literary agent named Charles Delovet, eventually remarries a woman named Irene, but never recovers. He visits Dena's and Leon's graves and brings flowers.

Some time later, Bowman shares a taxi from the airport with Christine Vassilaros, a dark-haired woman with a fifteen-year-old daughter, Anet. Their affair deepens rapidly. Christine finds him a house, an old farmhouse on a pond, which he buys in both their names. They move in the first week of December, and the months that follow are the happiest of his life. But Christine begins a secret affair with a contractor named Ken Rochet and files a lawsuit claiming sole ownership of the house, arguing it was put in both names only because she could not qualify for a mortgage. At trial she lies under oath. Despite Bowman's lawyer citing the Statute of Frauds, a legal principle requiring written contracts for property transfers, the jury rules in her favor. Bowman loses the house and only afterward learns about the other man.

Throughout these years, Beatrice declines. She has Lewy body disease, a condition in which microscopic proteins attack nerve cells in the brain. She hallucinates, forgets names, and one afternoon does not recognize her son. After a fall, she asks Bowman what happens when you die. Something glorious, he says. She replies that whatever you believe will happen is what happens. She dies in her sleep one spring morning.

Years later, Bowman encounters Anet on a subway platform. She is taking time off from college. He invites her to a party; after the guests leave, they smoke hash together, go to dinner, and return to his apartment, where they sleep together. He invites her to Paris on impulse. There their affair intensifies over days of restaurants, museums, and lovemaking. On the last morning, he rises early and leaves while she sleeps, with only a brief note. He rents a car and drives south toward Biarritz, thinking: Come and get your daughter. He does not try to imagine what she will do.

In the novel's final movement, Bowman rents a weekend house in Tivoli on the Hudson, where he meets Katherine, a secretary at Bard College with a passion for books. She becomes a companion, though the relationship never fully develops. At the Algonquin bar, Kimmel, his wartime cabinmate, appears by chance, older and cackling. The past rushes back.

Bowman is drawn to Ann Hennessy, a tall, unmarried woman who had been Baum's assistant. They become an informal couple, discreet at work but together on weekends. One July day, after swimming a great distance in the ocean, he nearly proposes, but the moment passes. Alone one autumn evening, he reads by lamplight and reflects on death, on his mother's belief, on a letter from Enid, and on the accumulated weight of his existence. He attends his aunt Dorothy's funeral and tells Ann they should go to Venice in November. "Do you mean it?" she asks. The novel closes on this quiet note of possibility, a man still reaching toward life.