LAST NIGHT: Stories
By James Salter. Knopf. 132 pp. $20
In the last few years, I've heard various editors and literary agents proclaim that the short story collections with the best chance for survival in an already dismal and steadily withering marketplace (even the Atlantic Monthly has recently decided to stop publishing fiction) are those with something recognizably similar about each piece. It makes the book easier to pitch, apparently. These are love stories, the salesperson can say. These stories are written in a gritty, streetwise style. These are stories about being young and on the make in New York City. Etc. If that's true, then James Salter's new collection, Last Night , will do just fine.
There's no question that all of these stories share Salter's exquisite prose, his talent for flitting gracefully between points of view, his uncanny ability to sum up a character in a single detail. In "Eyes of the Stars," he describes an aging television actress. "Her nostrils flared. . . . She had two distinct ways of doing it. One was in pride and anger, a thoroughbred flaring. The other was more intimate, like the raising of an eyebrow."
It is also true that these stories have certain elements of character and setting in common. Salter's people are smart, witty, libidinous and romantic, likely to experience their most important personal epiphanies at dinner parties or in fashionable restaurants. And almost all of the stories revolve around relationships in one way or another: faltering marriages, missed opportunities and betrayals, past loves resurfacing in unexpected ways.
More than that, each of these stories has a secret hidden beneath a seemingly innocuous veneer, a moment at which Salter reveals that everything is not as it seems or that what the characters believe to be true about their lives is, in fact, horribly false. In "Give," a wife asks her husband to break with a mutual friend for surprising reasons. In the title story, a husband and his mistress assist in his wife's suicide, but nothing goes the way they planned. Salter withholds information not as a way to generate suspense, though certainly each revelation carries with it the kind of shudder produced by the best plot twist, but as a way to deepen the interior lives of his characters. "Such Fun," for example, follows three recently single women from a restaurant luncheon back to a Washington Square apartment for drinks. The reader perceives right away that one of them, Jane, is somehow separate from the others. She doesn't drink as much. She's a little jealous of her friends, not quite as bitter about her ex or as comfortable engaging in racy topics of discussion. When Salter reveals the true reason for her remove, however, the story pivots on its axis and becomes something altogether richer and more complex.
It's potentially troubling, I suppose, that I'm having to be so deliberately vague in order not to disclose the nature of all these secrets. It suggests the possibility that if the secrets were revealed, there'd be no point in reading the book. I don't think that's the case. It's merely that their revelations should be experienced rather than described.
In "Comet," the protagonist is granted a glimpse beneath the surface of his existence. "He had done everything wrong, he realized, in the wrong order. He had scuttled his life." The effect of Salter's surprises is a bit like that, sudden and heart-breaking and true.
One story, "My Lord You," stands apart, not because it's better the others, though it is, in fact, one of the best in the collection, or because the style is somehow different. It's recognizable as a Salter story from the opening paragraph: "There were crumpled napkins on the table, wineglasses still with dark remnant in them. . . . It had been a success except for one thing: Brennan." Brennan is a poet who shows up drunk at the tag end of the party and leaves a lingering impression on Ardis, the lonely housewife at the center of the piece. Eventually she rides her bike by his house and finds not the poet but his huge and mysterious dog. What's different here is the relationship that develops. The dog becomes a kind of obsession for her, a stand-in for Brennan himself, a reminder of all the things her life is not.
In an ideal world, a writer of Salter's stature wouldn't have to worry about the business side of publishing. He's got two memoirs out there and five critically acclaimed novels and a previous collection, Dusk and Other Stories , which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1989. In an ideal world, his books would leap from shelf to cash register on the strength of his track record alone.
This, however, is not an ideal world. Sales wisdom aside, the innate similarity of these stories is perhaps the collection's only weakness. Though each story works beautifully on its own, the characters and their secrets tend to blur and overlap when considered all at once. Still, this is terrific fiction, written by an important writer. These stories should be read and savored for that reason alone. ·
Michael Knight is the author of a novel, "Divining Rod," and two collections of short fiction.
