August 22, 2006
James Salter, Last Night
On the plane yesterday I read James Salter’s Last Night, a slim collection of stories in which each tale would seem too brief were it not for the author’s aptitude for compression. More than any other fiction I’ve read in the past few years, the stories possess a quality I identify as “adult”—the light in these stories is amber, refracted through the bottom of a highball glass—despite the fact that Salter’s philandering protagonists expect, like children, to slip the yoke of consequence. They never do, and it’s to Salter’s credit that each denouement carries its own emotional weight.
Joyce Carol Oates, in an appreciation of Salter (NYRB subscriber–only link) written on the occasion of the publication in 2005 of Last Night, introduces his short fiction this way:
Dusk and Last Night are appropriate titles for Salter's slender collections of stories, which unfold with dreamlike fluidity in an atmosphere of shadows and indistinct forms, like watercolors in a dark palette. As Salter's novels are comprised of exquisite set pieces, often self-contained, so his short stories suggest novellas or novels compressed into a few pages. Both Dusk and Last Night, the new collection, contain memorable stories, yet a number of others ("Am Strande von Tanger," "The Cinema," "Lost Sons," "Via Negativa," "The Destruction of the Goetheanum," from Dusk; "Comet," "Eyes of the Stars," "Platinum," "Arlington," from Last Night) move so swiftly and disjointedly as to arouse expectation in the way of trailers for intriguing films that turn out to be the films themselves, abruptly truncated. It's as if the writer's imagination has leapt ahead of his capacity for, or interest in, the work of expression; an impatience with formal storytelling and chronological development . . .
Next time you’re in a bookstore, pick this collection up and spend ten minutes reading one of the stories. I recommend “Such Fun,” “Arlington,” and “Last Night”.