Dusk and other stories

Sadly, I only discovered James Salter recently, after reading his obituary. His popularity among other writers doesn't surprise me. The prose in this collection of short stories dazzles. Salter has a way of juxtaposing a flurry of images within the space of a paragraph while only supplying just enough information to allow the reader's progress through the narrative. A lot of the characters in this particular collection seem to be women resolved to their bitterness - failed lives or living failures. When I was most engaged, as with the story Dirt (my favorite of the bunch) he conveys his metaphors without writing them on the nose. They appear once the story has finished, there all along. These are stories demanding to be read again. You need their endings to appreciate their beginnings, which is one of the reasons I'm not surprised I hadn't heard of Salter before.

There were moments reading these stories when the prose slipped over the page like a double layer of velum. The imagery is precise but erratic. Eventually, the sentences amount to an incredible shape of story but the process, particularly the first read, can be disorienting. It wouldn't be fair to call Salter's prose arduous, his project is more satisfying than that, rather, while reading I often had the experience of losing my engagement - my eyes scanned over the words while my mind wandered and when I "awoke" I had to go back and find the sentence where I derailed in order to start again. I had that experience with these stories too many times to be coincidental.

I am intrigued enough to pursue more Salter. I look forward to trying one of his novels, where his thoughts can have a little more room to stretch, and where I might be able to find his rhythm, as a reader, more easily.