[In the following positive review, Baveystock commends Salter's clear and uncluttered prose in Dusk and Other Stories.]

The eleven stories in James Salter's first collection of short fiction [Dusk] are curiously timeless, yet unerringly evocative of a time not long past. This edition fudges the question as to when they were written by declaring some to be new while “others were published individually over a span of years”. Salter himself omits anything which might date his fiction: there are no references to current events, no brand names, and meals remain unpriced. This is entirely characteristic of Salter's style, which is as spare and uncluttered as possible, a note struck from the first paragraph of the first story, “Am Strande von Tanger”: “Barcelona at dawn. The hotels are dark. All the great avenues are pointing to the sea.”

As even this briefest of quotations should make clear, the ghost of Hemingway stalks these stories, and not just in their prose rhythms. Four of the stories are set in Europe, and those that are not occupy an insubstantial no-man's land that is evidently America. Thus Barcelona, Basel and a host of Tuscan towns are the only settings here that are graced with names. These parts of Europe are viewed through the eyes of rootless, solitary male Americans who prefer to lose themselves in the simple rituals of food, drink and sex.

The blunted ennui of these characters not only brings Hemingway to mind, but also the narrator of Salter's novel, A Sport and a Pastime: “I only want whoever reads this to be as resigned as I am. There's enough passion in the world already.” Indeed, there is more than an echo of this earlier work in the story “American Express”, as two rich young Americans tour Europe in their sports car, a young Italian girl in tow. It is the longest story in this collection, and undoubtedly the best, as it traverses the years of the two men's friendship with extreme grace: it is much the better for straying out of the rather restricted confines of many of the other stories here.

There is hardly a dud among them, however, and the brevity of “Twenty Minutes”, the time a woman injured in a riding accident takes to die, is an essential part of its poignancy. As she lies in the fading light—many of these stories contain the melancholic hour of dusk—brief, painful moments from her life return to her. Salter's thumbnail descriptions often have the poignancy and near-surreality of memories, and in this story he uses this gift to brilliant effect. Another talent he clearly possesses is for the memorable ending; it is used three times in this collection to introduce a fresh perspective at the eleventh hour. “Foreign Shores” is ostensibly the story of how a Dutch girl, au pair to a little boy, loses her job as a result of an unwise liaison. The story ends with the boy's mother (her employer) remembering this event several years later, and the sudden flaring of her jealousy reveals a hitherto hidden dimension to this simple tale.

It is the purity of Salter's prose that makes it such a pleasure to read; if some would criticize this as a triumph of style over content, Salter's best defence comes out of the mouth of one of his own characters, a film director explaining his latest work: “Its power came from its chasteness, the discipline of its images. It was a film of indirection, the surface was calm with the calm of daily life. That was not to say still. Beneath the visible were emotions more potent for their concealment.” Dusk is such a chaste and disciplined work.