I'd recommend certain stories from this collection. I wouldn't recommend the entire collection, which reads like erudite Carver. Salter tries and often succeeds in compressing character's lives into carefully crafted sentences, and the effect when he's on is one in which the past arrives simultaneously with present narrative action. It's a wierd effect that Salter achieves by writing sentences within paragraphs that seem unrelated when read in isolation. As Rick Moody said of Amy Hempel's writing, with Salter, "It's all about the sentences." One can imagine Salter developing a process akin to what happens when stonemasons erect a building's facade, laying one brick on top of the last, beside another. The story "American Express" does something wonderful with this one-sentence-at-a-time technique, giving shape to two upshot bankers' entire lives, both the ruthless early years and the hapless later years, when both men travel to Italy and share in the seduction of a young woman while trying to recapture some of the zest of their early years.

The reason this story seems one of the stronger pieces in the text is because Salter's craft and his subject seem to serve each other well. Other stories lean too closely toward polemic rather than satire because Salter's characters lack the sort of historical depth through which their actions can be viewed as tragic. This is what happens in "Foreign Shores:" the characters have clearly burned themselves out. Salter enacts this fading, so that when we travel with his characters to Italy and watch the men slough from one town to the next, eventually winding up picking up a school girl and taking her with them, we feel the underlayer of pain when, for instance, the girl calls home one morning after sleeping with the second of the two friends, or, the night before, when the more headstrong of the two has hardly to work at all to convince his friend the girl would be willing to take him to bed, too.