A Daredevil Ponders Mortality

...The loss of a coy mistress teaches them nothing about the tragic limits of their ambition...

...It simply reveals the hypocrisies of callow arrogance and elder piety...

...But this passage does not teem as expected with an esthete's rapture...

...Hollis declines Carol's invitation to abandon his family and travel with her and another woman to Asia, and she mocks his new life as clichéd...

...Hollis and Carol are not simply unsure about whether they feel regret, they are each unsure what it is they feel regret for—the past or the present...

...Mere petty philanderers, these men bear only a superficial resemblance to Salter's typical heroes...

...In "Bangkok," by contrast, Hollis, a rare book dealer, has long since abandoned the pleasures of the flesh when a former lover, Carol, pays a surprise visit to his shop...

...Four masterpieces are behind him—A Sport and a Pastime (1967), Light Years (1975), Solo Faces (1979), Dusk and Other Stories (1988)—but Salter, ever the perfectionist, still fusses with his style, advancing the syntax of modernism in complete indifference to the clever, self-referential fashions of contemporary fiction...

...Ending in a Chekhovian twist, it is a deliciously cruel portrait of shallow people, but the suffering it portrays pales next to "Such Fun," in which a woman with untreatable cancer silently endures the frivolity of her healthy, unknowing friends...

...They may also spot a typographical oddity: the use of the Joycean dash in place of quotation marks to set off dialogue...

...The last resort, abandoning the craft and parachuting to safety, would result in his being "washed out...

...Brian indignantly refuses, storms from the table, and calls Pam to declare that his father-in-law will not come between them...

...Aloft, he discovered the weather forecast had misjudged the speed and direction of the wind...

...He was lost, and his plane was quickly running out of fuel...

...The signal coming from the radio was inscrutable...

...In the centerpiece story, "Platinum," Salter erects an urban epic in miniature, reaffirming Tolstoy's dictum at the start of Anna Karenina regarding the sad fate of the happy family...

...Reviewed by Benjamin Strong Contributor, the "Believer," the "Village Voice" One spring evening a month shy of his 20th birthday, near the end of his training to become an Air Force pilot, James Salter took off from a runway outside of Newburgh, New York...

...Taut, ruthless, surprising, Last Night is that rarity today among short story collections, a meaty book...

...Instead, the author's tone is detached, even sardonic...

...To know with certainty what constitutes an authentic life is a primary concern for Salter's characters, and yet in "Bangkok" they wonder if certainty is ever possible...

...Men of action—his protagonists are cut from the Hemingway mold—go after what they want and inexorably overreach...

...The best thing was to resume work...

...The apartment is owned by Brule, a middle-aged attorney who "had defended some notorious clients and, less publicized, was said to have done unpaid work for those with no resources or hope...

...He knew what her skin felt like, it was silky...

...He had also been instructed never to attempt an emergency landing at night, but he descended anyway, toward what looked like a small field among porch lights...

...In the deceptively slim Last Night, Salter's second volume of stories, his characters ponder mortality for the first time...

...Like his career as a pilot, his fictional world is unthinkable without it...

...Frailty, human though it may be, interests me less...

...To paraphrase the film critic Michael Atkinson writing about Clint Eastwood, to call Last Night an old man's book is a serious compliment...

...Salter emerged from the crash without serious injury...

...In the Preface to his 1997 memoir Burning the Days, Salter notes almost apologetically: "In the past I have written about gods and have sometimes done that here...

...After a brief period of probationary scrutiny, he went on to fly more than 100 combat missions, including dogfights in the Korean War, before he reluctantly retired and became a writer...

...Flaubert is no longer our best guide...

...In Last Night, Salter may permit his men to doubt their ambitions, but the author continues to set his own sights unwaveringly on Olympus...

...Salter's prose, electric as usual, still displays the cunning of his daredevil youth, but the mood of regret here is distinctly autumnal...

...Bangkok" is a thematic rejoinder to "Platinum," a chamber piece refutation of the latter's expansive nihilism, helplessly acknowledging the costs exacted by middle age...

...Brian, has been sleeping with Pam, a coquettish United Nations aide with whom Brule is also sneaking around, he arranges a power lunch to demand that the affair end...

...Or worse, arriving at the highest summit, they realize there is nothing left to conquer, though they still have years to live out...

...He discovers, however, that she has already moved on to a Tunisian delegate with posh environs perched, like Brule's, high above the city...

...Arguably no American writer since Nabokov—not even Updike—has written so ecstatically in defense ofbourgeois luxury as Salter...

...After she departs, Hollis has difficulty composing himself: "The past, like a sudden tide, had swept back over him, not as it had been but as he could not help remembering it...

...Reading these 10 tales of infidelity...

...Thus when Brule learns that one of his sons-in-law...

...Now he marks prices in pencil on flyleaf corners, assesses the condition of famous authors' letters—"slight crease from folding"—and goes home to a wife and daughter...

...Those familiar with his work will notice that the prose is leaner than usual in Last Night, sometimes clipped...

...IN THE SAME WAY each story in Last Night plays off another...

...It seems to be an inclination...

...The title piece recounts the final evening of a terminally ill woman— the title assumes new meaning when the fatal dosage her doctor prescribes to euthanize her only puts her to sleep, and she awakes the next morning...

...When he touched down, one wing was torn off in a thicket of trees, yet somehow he guided the amputated fuselage into the front room of a clapboard house, where—in the sort of impossibly romantic detail found in the novels he began publishing 12 years later—a party was under way to celebrate the return of a soldier who had been a German prisoner of war...

...failure and death, it is hard not to speculate whether the author's age—he turns a venerable 80 this year—accounts for the uncharacteristically grizzled perspective...

...In the darkening sky he could not see the other fledglings that had gone out with him...

...Brule's noblesse oblige extends to his loved ones...

...The tale opens with an approving description of a grand apartment overlooking Central Park and its omate furnishings...

...Hollis once worked as a salesman, and in the evenings hunted for slender girls in swanky downtown bars...

...As dusk fell, the city lights below that might have guided him on a clearer night disappeared under a haze...

...How fortunate we are, then, to have Richard Ford and Alice Munro, and of course Salter...

...Every generation must write its own book of love...

...Divorced but remarried, and devoted to his three daughters from his first marriage, he provides for his entire handsome brood with smug contentment: "He was a figure of decency and honor, and like the old men described by Cicero who planted orchards they would not live to see the fruit from, but who did it out of a sense of responsibility and respect for the gods, he had a desire to bequeath the best of what he had known to his descendants...

...Ambition is the lowest common denominator in Salter's novels and stories...

...Real estate, Manhattan's ne plus ultra, is Pam's measure of worth: Brian and his wife live in a flat "a little on the dark side...

...Themes that surface once ironically emerge elsewhere with remorse...

...Consequences cannot deter the will of Salter's stubborn mortals...

...I do not worship gods, but I like to know they are there...

...Mountain climbers, poets, soldiers, captains of industry—patience and caution elude all of them...

...Details were vague...

...Romance in the 21st century is a nervous, peripatetic experience, modulated by travel and the erosion of nations...

...He should not have listened...