Twenty Minutes by James Salter, 1988
The magic trick:
A fairly disorienting trip through a woman’s thoughts during a life-or-death emergency
More James Salter today for you, after I mostly complained about his story “Bangkok” yesterday on SSMT.
“Twenty Minutes” follows in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows Of Kilimanjaro” and Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet In The Brain” – great short stories that feature a protagonist whose life flashes before his eyes as death takes hold. It’s a neat way for the author to share a bunch of backstory in a poignant way.
Same here in “Twenty Minutes,” where a woman is thrown off her horse and lays in the Colorado mountains, facing death and thinking about some random scenes from her life.
There is something here a little different from those Hemingway and Wolff stories, though. The narration flows in a way that makes it unclear to the reader what exactly is happening. Are these her thoughts? Is this something that just happened? Are these people talking to her now or are they memories?
It’s not impossible to follow, but it’s difficult enough to disorient the reader and make you feel a little like the protagonist might, drifting in and out of reality.
And that’s quite a trick on Salter’s part.
The selection:
This happened near Carbondale to a womwan named Jane Vare. I met her once at a party. She was sitting on a couch with her arms stretched out on either side and a drink in one hand. We talked about dogs.
She had an old greyhound. She’d bought him to save his life, she said. At the track they put them down rather than feed them when they stopped winning, sometimes three or four together, threw them in the back of a truck and drove to the dump. This dog was named Phil. He was stiff and nearly blind, but she admired his dignity. He sometimes lifted his leg against the wall, almost as high as the door handle, but he had a fine face.
Tack on the kitchen table, mud on the wideboard floor. In she strode like a young groom in a worn jacket and boots. She had what they called a good seat and ribbons layered like feathers on the wall. Her father had lived in Ireland where they rode into the dining room on Sunday morning and the host ded fallen on the bed in full attire. Her own life had become like that. Money and dents in the side of her nearly new Swedish car. Her husband had been gone for a year.
Around Carbondale the river drops down and widens. There’s a spidery trestle bridge, many times repainted, and they used to mine coal.
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