I should preface this by saying that I���m not typically a big fan of contemporary short stories: I���m certainly not one to go in for many of the often formulaic and derivative New Yorker style pieces that seem to abound in just about every magazine and collection���often the very ones that get praised so highly. I���m much more interested in short stories that work well, and I���ve found that this is only the case for those who pioneered the form and who were masters at it: Poe, James, Mansfield, Borges, and company. However, I am trying to make an effort in 2013 to read more short stories, so I picked up Salter���s only short story collection today.

������Imagine my surprise: me, a reader who prefers novels, besotted by the only short story collection this man wrote. I���m not even sure what Salter does that is so bewitching: his prose is simplistic; his sentences tend to be laconic and terse. But he does very intriguing things with temporality, and he���s able to move adroitly from one character���s perspective to another���s without leaving the reader feeling jarred or causing his narrative to flounder. There is also a skill evident here when it comes to shifting levels of consciousness and memory���for example, in ���Twenty Minutes,��� a woman who has been thrown from her horse, and knowing she has twenty minutes before shock gives way to full-blown pain, relives the most pressing memories in her life in a nonlinear fashion that isn���t Salter writing stream-of-consciousness so much as him proving to be incisive in getting at people���s various states of psychological unrest and feelings of loneliness.

This is also a wide-ranging collection: the title story is one of the strongest���so it���s no surprise that the collection is named after it���and deals with the static life of a woman turned forty-nine, her regrets and her conflicted ways of dealing with those in her every day life; one piece looks at the levels of camaraderie, resentment, and jealousy in our adult relationships as they are formed in early life by focusing on a reunion at West Point; and another story offers an hallucinatory midnight stroll through the suburbs as a man who is a recovering alcoholic either falls off the wagon or, and Salter is really superb in this piece (���Akhnilo���), is completely sober.

I���ve reached the ten-minute deadline I give myself for most reviews on here, but I don���t yet feel that I���ve been able to convey just how Salter���s prose struck me here���nor can I attempt to describe just what he does. But whatever he does, he does remarkably well and with such grace and ease that it���s a marvel the complex depths he plumbs here. ( )

Salter was a pilot before he was a writer, and his style seems to retain the movement and economy of flying. He prefers to flit across a room, a city, or a person than to describe it in detail--he opens one story this way: "Barcelona at dawn. The hotels are dark. All the great avenues are pointing to the sea." A club is described this way: "Unknown brilliant faces jammed at the bar. The dark, dramatic eye that blazes for a moment and disappears."

One is immediately impressed by Salter's lyricism and vitality, but begins to tire after 20 pages of evasive maneuvers. One wishes Salter would just spend a full paragraph or two describing a scene, or lingering at the expression on someone's face. The stories are "artsy," minimal, and sensual and therefore suit the European setting well--they seem to fit into one's idea of a European sensibility. The stories are never named too specifically--but only make sense at some indirect or meta level.

Salter's short story style seems much more experimental than someone like John Cheever--though a blurb on the back cover puts him in the same camp. In the introduction, Philip Gourevitch touches on this, putting it nicely: that Salter "seems prepared to allow himself anything," and that he "continuously refreshes the short story form." Though some stories shine, other stories may have benefitted from a more traditional treatment. ( )

A lot of James Salters work seem to be stories about the tough, independent manly man. But they have a wonderful dark melancholy to them that makes them worth reading.
The short stories in this collection tended to the vague and dreamy as well. Not sure what I've got from it, but it was an enjoyable read. ( )

not as good as Last Night. ( )

Although I can see, intellectually, that James Salter is a talented writer, these stories failed to touch me emotionally or creatively.

Salter is very much a writer of moods - indeed, each of these pieces is like a different slice of atmospheric moodiness, usually melancholy, uncertain, searching for a resolution that never really comes.

He is also a writer of complex thoughts, and these are the moments that I liked best in his work. These are represented in the passages where we delve deeply in the thoughts and delusions of a character, often into ideas that are unsociable or even taboo.

Take this description of the character Malcolm in the opening story of the collection:

"Malcolm believes in Malraux and Max Weber: art is the real history of nations. In the details of his person there is evidence of a process not fully complete. It is the making of a man into a true instrument. He is preparing for the arrival of that great artist he one day expects to be, an artist in the truly modern sense which is to say without accomplishments but with the conviction of genius. An artist freed from the demands of craft, an artist of concepts, generosity, his work is the creation of the legend of himself. So long as he is provided with even a single follower he can believe in the sanctity of this design."

That is a brilliant observation, one that flirts with artistic narcissism and simultaneously deflates it. These are the gems to be found scattered throughout the stories in this book.

Unfortunately for me, these moments of lucid insight are not enough. I want story, man! Salter falters seriously in this respect, as we drift into the lives of his characters, see into their complexity, and then abruptly drop out again. There is not a story here that doesn't follow this exact pattern.

Look, I get it. There is a trend in American short story writing of this period that savors this type of writing. It's straight out of the Raymond Carver playbook.

But me, I want narrative, story, drive, conflict and resolution! It's there in so many other great American short story writers - yes, Poe, Hawthorne, James, all the classics. But it is also there in relative contemporaries such as O'Connor, Updike, even Cheever, to whom Salter is sometimes compared. Without that element to give the underlying ideas a bit of spice and coherence, this kind of storytelling is just not my cup of tea. ( )