MICHAEL PRODGER discovers a ‘perfect’ book by the American writer James Salter

Many years ago, I was invited to a publishing dinner in honour of James Salter. I went not having read any of his books (a lack of courtesy about which I still feel ashamed) but knowing that he was a writer I should have read. I was seated next to him and he was gracious, intelligent and very modest. I had an excellent evening, rather better than his I expect, and came away determined to see if his books were as impressive as he was. Within a few pages of A Sport

and a Pastime I knew that this one was. It is only a slim novel, just under 200 pages, but full to the brim. It is hard to know quite what it is – a romance, an erotic novel, a coming-of-age story, a tale of yearning?

It deals with a brief and intensely physical love affair in France in the early 1960s between Phillip Dean, a charismatic but callow American college dropout, and Anne-marie Costallot, an 18-year-old shop girl in provincial Autun. Their story is told by an unnamed narrator who offers few clues other than he’s 34, foreign, a photographer and unreliable.

He warns the reader early on that ‘None of this is true’ and that ‘There’s enough passion in the world already’, but the particularities of his descriptions and the pitch of his yearning gives that the lie. The narrator watches the young couple hungrily, hoards what they say to him, and imagines what they do and say when alone. He himself is a little in love with Anne-marie but Phillip is his fixation. What he desires is their desire.

The sex is explicit (especially for 1967 when the book was published), but necessarily so: there is no need for niceties let alone embarrassment with these lovers. And Salter’s prose is immaculate – direct, adjective-free and cool. He was a writer of few words. Perhaps it was just as well I hadn’t read A Sport when I met him. I’d have made a fool of myself and told him he’d written a perfect book.