Krissy Kneen on age and desire in the work of James Salter.

I am very fond of listening to The New Yorker fiction podcast. The monthly audio recording features a writer reading another writer’s short story, and then discussing it with the magazine’s fiction editor. When I first discovered the podcast, I was treated to one such reading.

It seemed simple and straightforward: a terminally ill woman goes out to dinner with her husband. Quietly, and without unnecessary flourishes, the story becomes more complex. The dinner is to be the woman’s last meal. After it, she will take her own life to save herself from the pain of a protracted illness. They are sharing the meal with a mutual friend. The story is slippery. It keeps turning in on itself. Assumptions are challenged and, at some point, I found myself weeping into the washing up as I listened to the painful and gorgeous ending. I rinsed the suds off my hands, wiped away my tears and listened to the story again. I must have listened to it 20 times since I first heard it in 2007. It is the title story in a collection, Last Night by James Salter. I bought the collection and I fell in love. There were other stories in there that I also reread almost immediately. On the strength of those insightful short stories, I became a Salter devotee.

Salter is 87 years old and has just released a novel, All That Is. In this book, Salter has avoided all of those crafty tricks that writers use to hook a reader into a story. Every writer knows that to establish narrative drive there has to be some central question that the protagonist needs answered. Salter knows this too. His 1979 novel, Solo Faces, about a rock climber, is a quiet look at personal strength and determination. How does a person conquer a mountain? the book asks, and the answer is wonderful and profound – quiet and without ego.

All That Is is quite another thing. In this novel we see one adult life, that of Philip Bowman, a man who has no particular ambitions and no burning question. Yet sharing his existence for the length of the book leads the reader to question their own. Has it been well lived? Was it kind and compassionate? Was there enough love? There are no writerly tricks here, just a sure, firm hand that we can relax into.

Salter is known for his skill at writing sex. On an episode of First Tuesday Book Club last year, the panel became very excited about Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime. In this novel, an American man and a poor French country girl have a whirlwind affair. The relationship is gloriously carnal, with some of the sexiest lovemaking ever penned, but all of it is seen or imagined by the man’s friend, who is experiencing the sex vicariously. It is uncomfortably arousing to experience such an intimate relationship through the eyes of a voyeur.

At 87, Salter can still describe the machinations of lovemaking with the vigour of a much younger man.

‘I married the wrong man,’ she said.

She lay face down and he knelt between her legs for what seemed a long time, then began to arrange them a little, unhurriedly like setting up a tripod. In the early light she was without flaw, her beautiful back, her hip’s roundness. She felt him slowly enter, she reached beneath, it was there, becoming part of her. The slow profound rhythm began, hardly varying but as time passed somehow more and more intense.

Outside, the street was completely silent, in adjoining rooms people were asleep. She began to cry out. He was trying to slow himself, to prevent it and make it go on, but she was trembling like a tree about to fall, her cries were leaking beneath the door.

The above is from All That Is, and the rest of the book is peppered with equally erotic passages. Unlike A Sport and a Pastime, All That Is is not predominantly about sex, but the intensity of the lovemaking, the beauty of it, is enough to make me wonder about the physicality of a writer who has advanced in years but who can still seduce me with his words.

Salter is not the first older man to tackle sex head on in his work. Philip Roth has been famously worrying at the idea of age and desire in an annual series of novels, each one slimmer than the last, each one more bitter. Gabriel García Márquez tackled the subject in Memories of My Melancholy Whores, in which an old man hires a teenage virgin to remind him of his own lost sexual past. Nobel Prize-winning Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata exquisitely describes an old man’s visits to a house where he lies all night beside a drugged young naked girl who will not wake no matter how he touches her or explores her body.

Unlike these other celebrated writers, Salter approaches his subject with love rather than with bitterness. Although it is a trap to think that a novel is in some way autobiographical, Salter’s pure celebration of the physical pleasures of making love seem to be penned by a man who still enjoys his own sexuality. Salter’s character Bowman loves women and their bodies. His tenderness is seductive. Even his eventual cruelty seems only to make him more complex, more human. Kawabata, García Márquez and Roth present sex as some great prize now lost. There is an edge of anger in their work, a sadness, where Salter presents only joy.

As a reader, I have fallen for him. I forget that this writer is almost twice my age. I have collected Salter’s body of work and guard it jealously. I have all of his books stored beside my bed. I am somehow certain that the writer himself would be happy with his place quietly sleeping beside me.

Krissy Kneen is a bookseller and writer in Brisbane. Her memoir,