Beauty in the Ordinary (James Salter) (original) (raw)

2020, Ploughshares (online)

There is deep breathing and the seriousness of living things at the heart of James Salter's prose, as if his words were made of same matter as the world they conjure up, reproving those who, like many of his characters, believe that the true things, the complicated things, the painful things belong to the realm of the ineffable. The almost incantatory rhythms of his language have been called elegant and ornate, decadent, exultant, and, in an infamous 1975 New York Times review of what is perhaps his best novel, Light Years (1975), the "mandarin" medium of an "overwritten, chi-chi, and rather silly novel." It is for the luminosity of his language, however, that one reads James Salter, since in his novels style is a form of truth, or at least one of the more direct means of apprehending truths. Salter's characters are forever in search of some version of the truth, his narrators fumble about trying to elucidate it, and his plots fruitlessly promise it over and over again, but it is in the rhythms of his descriptive passages, with their curious resemblance to film stills (in the sixties Salter was a briefly a screenwriter and film producer) or, occasionally, to still life paintings, that one at last gets a sense that Salter has said something important, conveying a sense of the world as it really is, perhaps despite his own intentions.