Although still something of a cult figure, James Salter, because of his short fiction, inhabits the same rarefied heights as such establishment idols as Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams (whose stories are much superior to his plays) and John Cheever. Like that of the first three, his style is opulent and his content excruciating; like Cheever's, his characters are mostly well off, youngish, suburban American WASPs who spend time in Europe. Beyond this, I'm at a loss for literary comparisons.

I have always avoided linking the arts. Despite Pater's “architecture is frozen music,” the arts are not interchangeable; if they were, we'd need only one. Yet at times, confronted by James Salter's unique verbal world, I find myself involuntarily turning to music and movies for my metaphors. His prose is true prose—cliff-hanging prose—not poetry, but its spell stems less from a gift to spin yarns than from rhythm and echo, from color in the guise of “dark” vowels and clipped consonants, and from tune-like phrases with their repetition and variation—aural attributes ringing through the pages with a sensuality as continual, and as impossible to depict in words, as the continual sensuality in, say, Debussy. His prose is also visual, deceptively unplotted, elliptical, with “silent” spots where we can nonetheless “hear” what's going on for long periods without dialogue, as in an Antonioni film. Indeed, as with Antonioni, decor chez Salter, if not actually a hero, is at least a catalyst; with a few deft strokes the sun and shadow of Barcelona, Rome, Long Island, West Point, southern France or central Germany are evoked as tellingly as any of the unsettled humans that dwell in his paragraphs.

At other times his pen seems dipped in what some liberationists used to call—without defining it—gay sensibility (he focuses on expensive soap or women's clothes with an unapologetically delicate relish that would be shunned by a Mailer of a Wolfe, lest we get funny ideas), except that Salter is not gay. Definitions are elusive, and shift with the times.

Rather, his sensibility is French. That is, his perceptions are superficial in the best sense—crucially “impressionistic” like a Monet lily caught in a fugitive second and imprinted on our brain forever. This French sensibility, rare in America, falls like dew into Salter's sentences, emitting a specialized flavor without, thank heaven, being “experimental” or even quirky.

Dusk, an assemblage of 11 stories just issued on lasting creamy stock by North Point Press, represents more of a continuation than an evolution in Salter's relatively spare catalogue. He does not improve (do even the greatest, after a point, really improve?) but merely recasts his always perfect notions into alternative shapes. Like composer Maurice Ravel, Salter sprouted full-blown from the muse's head. His ideas, ebbing and swelling with messages of sex and death, never much change with the passing tides. Each of the first five stories, by design or not, portrays male-female intercourse with a carnal urgency that throbs on the page. The remaining six contain nothing sexually explicit, although they're “about” sex, or the pangs thereof.

Salter's early novel, A Sport and a Pastime, published 23 years ago, is, in skill of diction and in erotic intent, identical with the first story here, “Am Strande von Tanger,” recounted all in the present tense. It displays the delusion of the creator spirit in an expatriate American, “an artist in the truly modern sense which is to say without accomplishment but with the conviction of genius.”

Similarly, the last story, “The Destruction of Goetheanum,” concerns an obscure writer (“If he was not great, he was following the path of greatness which is the same as disaster”), a woman (“She moved with a kind of negligent grace, like a dancer whose career has ended”), his work (“Nothing is heavier than paper”), and the collapse of an ideal. Musical names—Scriabin, Wozzeck, The Magic Flute—are dropped like scented bath crystals that permeate a Germany as unique to Salter's imagination (but as real a locus for the reader) as Amerika was to Kafka's. Past and present interweave with diary-like non sequiturs that ultimately cohere in a sensible, melancholy fabric.

Many of these stories are wistful, melancholy. “Twenty Minutes” is the period of grace between sudden fatal trauma and the moment when pain begins, granted in this case to a woman, thrown from a horse, who sees her life pass before her, juxtaposing hopeless horror with fleshly frivolity.

In “American Express,” Salter charts the trail of two yuppie lawyers meaninglessly seeking Meaning through vague lusts and continental tourism. They can afford, in Fitzgerald's word, to be “careless,” in the Midi where “they had breakfast together in hotels with the sound of workmen chipping at the stone of the fountain outside,” in Venice where in some palazzo's “curtained upper floors the legs of countesses uncoiled, slathering on the sheets like a serpent,” then back to Manhattan and “that great, unchanging order of those who live by wages, whose world is unlit and who do not realize what is above.”

By contrast, “Foreign Shores” is a sad little masterpiece about a Dutch babysitter named Truus, not too bright, who, when it is learned by her uppercrust boss, Gloria (of the “mass of blonde hair” whose “first entrance was always stunning”), that she's having a fling with a smalltime international pornographer (“there was something spoiled about him, like a student who has been expelled and is undisturbed by it”), is summarily fired with nowhere to turn. At the end we learn that Truus may have landed in high society despite having been a bad girl, and for Gloria this “idea that there is an unearned happiness, that certain people find their way to it, nearly made her sick.”

A Roman tale called “The Cinema,” a cynical backstage glimpse at moviemaking and a romance twixt the stars, provides an odd contrast, in theme if not in texture, to a tale called “Lost Sons” about a military academy graduate at the reunion of 1960 (“a class on which Vietnam had fallen as stars fell on 1915 and 1931”) who turns out to be sensitive—an artist. “Of course he did not really think of himself as weird, it was only in their eyes.”

Polish is the keynote of a Salter melody—the polish of an exquisitely necessary trope, which in a measure or two can set the tone, desperate or wistful, of a whole little work gleaming with the economy of a good song; indeed, this garland of stories, at its best, resembles an elegant cycle of songs which could hardly be changed for the better. If, however, there were to be a 12th or 13th offering, one could ask for something giddy; for Salter, long on wit, is short on humor.

What lingers? This:

If James Salter steps sideways rather than forward, he's on the path of many great artists. His writing, as it's being read, feels abstract (but music is always abstract) until in quick retrospect it settles into a stream of pure narrative. The narrative is generally of failure, a writer's failure, and one guesses the writer to be our writer.

Now in reality Salter is a success, in the only way that any artist need be: he is appreciated by people he does not know. Still, no serious artist, no matter how appreciated, thinks of himself as a success; he knows wherein he has not succeeded and that knowledge obsesses him. The writers about whom Salter writes, write of the senselessness of writing, and yet, in the face of all odds, and whether or not they are “any good,” they persist. This paradox—writing about the writing about that which may not be worth writing about—is in the final analysis elating and hopeful. Hope is what lingers.