James Salter, Last Night

Salter is frequently tagged with the label "writer's writer," which is usually just another way of saying that an author's crystalline prose style and/or chosen milieux are more appreciated by fellow artists than his or her storylines are appreciated by general readers. In the case of this collection of ten short stories, the label is apt. Salter's sentences are swift and savage, beautiful when not biting and often both at once. His protagonists typically display a certain sophisticated decadence; they are the sort of people who disrupt carefully calibrated social situations while in the process of ruining themselves with drink or marital infidelity, yet are still able to lash out cleverly at one another. But the incidents in these mostly brief pieces are too quickly sketched to make much of an impression—even the impression, so beloved of short story writers, that more is being left unsaid than appears on the surface. The one exception to this less-is-less quality is "Arlington," which has a military setting and a sudden, early change of narrative viewpoint that causes the story to turn itself inside out, elegantly, like a fine glove. The effect is exhilarating.

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