Customer Reviews

Last Night

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

You could say about this collection: "These aren't stories, they're sketches." And you'd have a point. But the thing about Salter is that he shows you only what's needed, then invites you to imagine the rest. This was true in his 1967 novel, A Sport and a Pastime. Almost 40 years later, it still is. When I think of Salter, I'm reminded of John Updike's remark, "A psychoanalyst talking is like playing golf on the moon --- even a chip shot carries for miles." Salter hits chip shots.

Many will find this writing overly mannered. Yes, there are crumpled napkins on tables uncleared from last night's dinner party: "glasses still with dark remnant on them, coffee stains, and plates with bits of hardened Brie." Privileged women pine for love -- or sex. At a man's funeral, there are women the widow has never seen before. A married man is having an affair with a male friend. A hill is made from a pile of junked cars. A romantic opportunity is missed.

Salter is too discreet to shove the engine room of life into our faces, but it's very much there. One story ends with a woman dying of cancer --- a young woman. Another focuses on an older woman on what is to be the final night of her life: "She had a face now that was for the afterlife and those she would meet there." The sentences drop, regular as coins. Salter's cadences are so hypnotic it's easy to miss them. But they are arrows to the real subject of these stories, which are, like the best stories about adult men and women, about honor and love in the face of death.

"Last Night." 132 pages. Ten stories. They may read like trifles, like exercises, like parlor tricks --- but you can't forget them. Could it be because they are small masterpieces?

Perhaps somewhere out there in America there are people who live like characters in James Salter novels, but I sincerely hope not. These are unpleasant, haunted and pathological people, and it is Salter's genius that you not only want to spend time with these sociopaths, but want to take them home, hand them a few drinks and listen to them talk. Salter's gift is as adamantine as ever in "Last Night," but unlike in his earlier classics like "Sport and a Pastime" and "Light Years," the erotic edge has been dulled by age and regret. None of the stories has an obvious beginning, end or `dramatic arc,' and the collection is much more interesting for that. Highly recommended for anyone who has stopped believing in happy endings.

These ten stories are simply perfect and therefore pretty much impossible to describe. From "Last Night" with its beautifully ambiguous title, the first story I read, to "Platinum," the last one I read, there is not one superfluous word in Mr. Salter's elegant prose. He can describe a person or place with a word or two; or when he's being long-winded, he may need a complete sentence. A retarded six-year old swimming in a pond has an anxious face "above the surface like a dog's." A dog is simply "yellow-eyed." A woman who is past 40 had "only her personality and good nature by that time, the rest, as she herself would say, had turned into a size fourteen." Another woman's only fault is that she didn't like to cook. "She couldn't cook and talk at the same time." Although many of Mr. Salter's characters are upper middleclass, they don't appear to be much better off than the rest of us. They just meet in nicer hotels to commit their adulteries. Some of them lead lives of quiet desperation. Mr. Salter is also the master of understated irony. For example, in "Last Night," arguably the best story in this small collection, a terminally ill woman plans her suicide with assistance from her husband and invites a young woman, "a family friend," to dine with her and her husband for her last supper. This quiet little story, as Garrison Keillor would say, will blow your head off.

Short stories do not get better than these.

All these stories concern romantic relationships told in a double time-frame, in which events in the present trigger memories of the past. All are incredibly spare and powerful, with characters, atmosphere, an entire affair evoked by a single concrete detail or turn of phrase. Many have no plot, with the suspense of the story created entirely by the manner in which the author reveals the facts, by what he leaves unsaid as much as by what he writes. In a very few instances, the author's manipulation is just a little too obvious, in a O. Henry sort of way. But these are the exceptions, and even they are utterly gripping. Some stories look back on happiness squandered or simply lost; the general tone is one of regret. But against this, in several tales, there is the older-but-wiser ability to find contentment in some relationship that may be less spectacular, but can stand the test of time. Other readers have commented on the similarity between the stories in this collection, but to me this gives them an accumulated strength akin to a theme-and-variations structure in music.

I discovered Salter last year in Joyce Carol Oats' review of "Last Night," appearing in the New York Review of Books. The 10 short stories in this slim little volume are further examples supporting the consensus among a number of reviewers that Salter is a writer's writer.

Most of the stories deal with what appears to be a romantic loving relationship. But, it turns out that there is something about each relationship that is not quite honest, and therein lies the "thud" that grabs you as the story ends.

It is sometimes perplexing to know just what that "thud" that hit you is all about. I feel it as an "uneasiness" that these upper middle class, refined people are not quite what they appear to be, and that a good part of what seems to be important in their lives is built on illusion or self-delusion --and then the truth is exposed!!! Oh horror! Oh! the relationship that we began with will never be again what it was then!!

I particularly liked "Comet". Each time I read it I see something new in the way Salter economically but skilfully tells us important things about his characters. The "thud" feeling I got on reading it for the first time reminded me of one of Hemingway's own favorites, "Hills like White Elephants."

I also liked "Arlington", a story about a soldier's lapse of loyalty to country and to corps to possess his love object. His description of what Arlington is to soldiers is sensitive,nostalgic yet forthright:

"With a sound at first faint but then clopping rhythmically he heard the hooves of horses, a team of six black horses with three erect riders and the now-empty caisson that had carried the coffin, the large spoked wheels rattling on the road. The riders, in their dark caps, did not look at him. The gravestones in dense, unbroken lines curved along the hillsides and down toward the river, as far as he could see, all the same height with here and there a larger, gray stone like an officer, mounted, amid the ranks. In the fading light they seemed to be waiting, fateful, massed as if for some great assault."

This story reminded me of "A Very Short Story" also one of Hemingway's.

If you like the works of James Salter, this slim volume will only add to one's appreciation of the brilliance of his work.
One can relate easily to many of the flawed characters he so beautifully and concisely describes. We know them. Similar people have been in all of our lives. On the other hand, the situations in which he has placed his characters are quite unlike those that most of us have experienced (or will experience). And that is how and why we read him with such astonishment. The sum total of these wonderful stories reminds me of a poem I read long ago:

You trounced on me with ill-
concealed pleasure

Now, I too, have learned offensive
defense and some techniques
of my own

Smile beloved - now we can play
together.

Writing a perfect short story, or striving to, is more challenging than tackling a novel with the same intention. Every writer, every teacher of creative writing, and every astute reader knows this. The two leading writers of short stories in English in our time are Alice Munro and James Salter. Munro is more prolific but I suspect even she admires Salter (in my experience, every writer does, as suggested by another reviewer).

Their styles and subjects are quite contrasting, however. Munro is often reflective and romantic. Salter is always aiming "right between the eyes," and this collection illustrates it beautifully. These are perhaps the most powerful short stories I have ever read, their characters and images resonating in my memory long after I set the book aside and moved on with my life.

The opening and closing stories are book-ends to the collection, crammed with haunting images - the solitary married man gazing upwards at the night sky while his wife attempts to fathom their relationship, and the throat-seizing twist in the last story.

Few contemporary works of fiction, in my opinion, bear re-reading. These will be re-read over and over by me in years to come, and I expect to experience a new thrill of admiration and anxiety with each reading. How does a story achieve both? You need to read Salter to find out.

By the way - Salter also wrote the best novel on middle-upper class American families. Light Years pust everything by John Cheever and Irwain Shaw in the shade. So why didn't it achieve the status level of their works? Life is unfair.

Salter's short story collection "Last Night" left me deeply unsettled, both for its content and for the ambivalence I felt towards much of it. Undoubtedly a delicate and profound writer, his style floats precariously close to the pretentious. His elliptical use of pronouns and insistence on holding out on important information sometimes just feels too writerly and fussy. However there's no denying the power in his stories. They are all remarkably similar, almost to a fault, but each one made me feel such strong emotion at times (ususally deep sadness)that it seems important to recommend these stories, pretentions and all.

My first exposure to James Salter came from The New Yorker's Fiction podcast. Thomas McGuane read and discussed the final story in this book from which it was named, Last Night. The story and the discussion was fantastic and as a result, I purchased this book. The sparse, yet dense stories are all mournful revealing the hurt we humans do to each other either intended or unknowingly.

Palm Court was my favorite of the ten short stories. I could not stop revisiting the notion of returning to unfulfilled or unsatisfied relationships. And the hope that one can recapture what was once unique but never fully claimed. Trying to rectify a mistake that cannot be undone due to time passed is just plain sad and Salter writes about it brilliantly in Palm Court.

All of his stories seem to amplify the hurt and pain of the characters all of whom have lost something along the way. Salter's world is definitely made up of flawed and unhappy people making his work compelling for its honesty and directness.

I believe there are a lot of people out there like the characters in these stories. No relationship is that simple and hard realizations hit fast and deep. I've had a few jolts myself in the past two years that felt like a Salter story.

Although all the stories here are written in the same style, I found myself really enjoying the ones that clicked for me (like "Last Night" or "Palm Court") but thinking the others were choppy and confusing.

The good ones make this slim volume of ten stories worth reading.