Summary
Dusk and Other Stories was James Salter's first collection of short fiction, eleven stories published by North Point Press in 1988, most of them first printed in The Paris Review, Grand Street and Esquire. Salter's people are mostly privileged: wealthy, attractive, well traveled, used to getting what they want. The stories open in bright light and then let the shadows in.
In "Twenty Minutes," a divorced woman is thrown from her horse and, lying hurt, sees her failed marriage go by in fragments. In the title story a woman in her forties, who knows how to give dinner parties and enter restaurants, is told by the man she has been seeing that he is going back to his wife. In "American Express," two young lawyers travel through Europe looking for something they cannot name, and their emptiness shows in their appetites. In "Foreign Shores" an embittered employer discovers what her Dutch au pair is really like. Other stories follow an American writer in exile in Basel ("The Destruction of the Goetheanum"), a screenwriter on a film shoot in Rome ("The Cinema") and a carpenter with a Dartmouth education in "Akhnilo."
Salter is admired above all for his sentences, which are spare and precise and leave a great deal unsaid; a whole life can pass in a paragraph. The stories are short, and the book is slim, but it rewards slow reading. Not everyone agreed it held together. Publishers Weekly thought Salter reached "a new height of grace and breathtaking virtuosity," while Kirkus found some of the pieces dull and said "the gems here lose some of their luster in the dull company." It suits readers who love Hemingway or Richard Yates, and anyone who cares about the sentence as much as the story.
Historical Context & Significance
Dusk and Other Stories won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1989, over Mary McGarry Morris's Vanished, Thomas Savage's The Corner of Rife and Pacific and Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Death of Methuselah. Salter already had a reputation as a writer's writer, a phrase Kirkus used of him in its review of this book.
Salter was born James Arnold Horowitz in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1925. He graduated from West Point in 1945 and flew more than a hundred combat missions as an Air Force fighter pilot in Korea, then left the military in 1957 after his first novel, The Hunters, and wrote A Sport and a Pastime (1967) and Light Years (1975). "Twenty Minutes" became the loose basis for Stacy Cochran's 1996 film Boys, with Winona Ryder and Lukas Haas. Salter's memoir Burning the Days followed in 1997 and his last novel, All That Is, in 2013. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in June 2015.
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