Burning the Days: Recollection.

"What we have here," said the young man to his companion as the latter fingered a copy of James Salter's Burning the Days: Recollection, "What we have here is a tome filled with metawriting - it is a triumph of words over the freeze-dried spiel that passes as literature nowadays."

"Oh, yes?" said the young man's companion, who was a great believer in brevity, conversational and otherwise.

"Despite my being happily moored in the romance of language, its capabilities and perversities, I am not at all shaken by the dismal context Burning the Days finds itself being published in just now: market-driven prose that panders to minds more expert at changing channels than turning a page, ears more entranced by junk-speech than the sound of well-rendered prose. (You need not agree. Your facial expressions always look like questions to me - questions no one can answer since you are a questionable person.) And since our bodies are no longer readily acclimated to reading and the small acts that occur during the process of reading - flipping back one or two chapters to find the line that resonates, and so on - less and less do we even bother with what are generally described as 'long, slow works,' since the time and attention books demand detracts from the less arduous ways we prefer to waste our time."

The young man continued, "While James Salter's charm as a distinctly American author is his penchant for writing short, declarative sentences, sentences that would, in the end, be more effective as captions - 'Despite all one knows, something clings to paper that once had value,' Salter writes in Burning, a phrase that has about it the ring of an advert for the Treasury Department - his work is too shallow to interest me personally." The young man paused and lit a cigarette in much the same way Cyril lights his cigarette in Oscar Wilde's The Decay of Lying; unlike Cyril, the young man's crooked pinkie finger was bejeweled.

After a while the young man said: "However, Burning the Days will interest an American audience for two very specific reasons, the first being that James Salter is a straight guy who writes like a homo. In his 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime, Salter was engaged in delineating memory punctuated by the pain and joy of recalled erotic events. Sport takes place in Dijon and centers on an affair between a rather louche American named Dean and a young French woman named Anne-Marie. While Dean delights in the sodomy he and Anne-Marie engage in whenever they can, we are less aware of its psychological effect than we should be because both Dean and Anne-Marie are subsumed by Salter's self-consciously 'poetic' voice ('This blue, indolent town. Its cats. Its pale sky. The empty sky of morning, drained and pure'), which is Truman Capote's voice, but Capote by way of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Unlike Capote, or Robbe-Grillet for that matter, Salter is not an intellectual. He is neither interested in nor capable of examining the theme Sport proposes to lay bare: the impersonality inherent in romantic love. The characters Salter attempts to create in Sport and the stories in his 1988 collection Dusk are not nearly as compelling to the author as his voice is to himself.

"In Burning, Salter describes, fleetingly, growing up in Manhattan. He was a middle-class New York Jew. 'I was a city child, pale, cared for, unaware,' Salter writes. His father was not 'intimate.... I never felt the absence of love, only of his interest. My mother may have felt the same.' It is difficult to gauge what the first Mrs. Salter felt, considering that she was as resolute in her self-absorption as her husband was in his disinterest. Salter found emotional refuge in books; he could walk freely through a kingdom of classics built by Scott, Dickens, and so on. To please his father, who had military aspirations, Salter enrolled at West Point; after graduating, he joined the Air Force. The friendships he establishes in both institutions, his flight plans - none of it is interesting. But what does interest is the amount of conjecture one can do while being bored by bombing missions: how many Jewish officers have there been in the Air Force? And how many Jews have attended West Point?"

The young man's companion, still silent, shifted in his chair; the chair's wicker back creaked. Both men were seated at a cafe. From time to time they looked at passersby, but not often.

The young man went on, "As I say, the book didn't interest me personally. But what I found compelling for you, since I know your interests better than you know yourself, were the years Salter spent after completing his tour of duty, or whatever you call it, in Paris, getting to 'know his mentor, Irwin Shaw, about whom Salter writes well but sparingly. Salter's vivid descriptions of drinking with Shaw in Paris and the Hamptons, and so on, betrayed not one bit of intellectual curiosity. One would like to know, for instance, what happened to the young author of the classic story 'The Girls in Their Summer Dresses' as he degenerated into an old man famous for churning out potboilers. But Salter uses his romanticism and sentimental view of most things as an excuse not to think: that is the second reason he will interest American audiences.

"For a long while," said the young man, "beginning in the '60s, Salter had a reasonably successful career as a screenwriter. He is the author of one very strange film l admire enormously, a Robert Redford movie called Downhill Racer. The film is replete with silences, silences which Redford did not know how to act in, or work with. Redford plays the skier of the title; he is the quintessential Salter boy-hero: slightly out of it, even dumb, but virile and oddly 'sensitive.' (It has just occurred to me that Salter's true metier is screenwriting, since screenplays have little to do with writing or thought, and a great deal to do with construction, at which Salter is expert.) At one point, Polanski, who was married to actress Sharon Tate, expressed an interest in directing Downhill Racer. Salter marveled at and was entranced by Polanski and Tate's domestic contentment, the gold aura that infects the atmosphere whenever a man loves a woman - traditional roles unencumbered by thought. (The last is not fair - I'm perfectly aware that breeders of a certain stripe do suffer, and I worry for them, just as I worry about you, pretending to be a wife in your silence.) Burning the Days is a project singular in its single-mindedness: to present history without analysis, just a guy speaking his mind."

Hilton Als is the author of The Women.