James Salter’s collection of short stories, Last Night, is written in understated style that agrees with the characters therein—they are secondary figures, many of them secondary in their own lives, successful quite some time ago, married for the first few times quite some time ago, only daring to view themselves honestly, with justified irony, at more or less the last minute of their current dilemmas. As a consequence, the poise of these tales makes them more remarkable than their protagonists. They aren’t minimalist, though they are rather spare, and they have the air of knowing exactly what they are aiming […]