American novelist, story writer, and screenwriter James Salter died on June 19th, leaving behind a body of work that presents a vision of a century in dramatic motion. He was a writer of the quotidian and a craftsman of the first water whose interest in sensory experiences is most evident in his arresting narrative passages. In similar fashion, his dialogue—sometimes so lean in its construction as to risk sparseness—is crisp and at times biting, the words spoken by characters belying deeper motives or beliefs.
Either ability—to craft such trenchant narration or to hear and replicate spoken language so shrewdly—is a remarkable and rare writerly gift. Noting here that Salter possessed them both seems an understatement. Others still come from distant admirers who knew James Salter only thorough the books themselves.
Tim Wille was a furniture designer, a little nervous and wild-eyed. When he talked to you he looked elsewhere, often at the wall. He no longer drank. He had been arrested while driving with a blood alcohol level that was. It was the best thing that ever happened to him—he gave up drinking, he said. He still had the look of it, though, along the edges. Or rather, he no longer drinks. And such complexity! Salter resists laxity, he resists equally the too-familiar and the overblown.
A breathtaking technical mastery here—physical description and information and anecdote powerfully combined to create an indelible character—is put in service to evoking a world we recognize. It is one that feels closely observed and deeply personal but at the same time universal.
It is this density and truth that I go to Salter for—the sense that a person has been captured, a life. Cara Blue Adams is a fiction writer and an assistant professor of creative writing at Seton Hall University. The fall was coming. Everything seemed to deny it. The days were still warm, the great, terminal sun poured down. The leaves, more luxuriant than ever, covered the trees.
