One More Time 

Cassada 
By James Salter 
Counterpoint, 205 pp 

Gail Caldwell
The Boston Globe 

   James Salter is a cherished, somewhat esoteric writer known widely for being not well known -- partly cherished, in other words, because he is esoteric. A beautiful stylist, he handles words as though they were fine marble: all angles and chiseled perfection, in search of the ideal form. This devotion to language works to different effect depending upon its subject; in the privileged world evoked in the novel "Light Years,'' for instance, Salter's style could take on the taut, too-precious feel of a violin. 
   His sentences are Hemingway with a touch of Monet flung about -- concise and yet lyrical, visually provocative and even exalted. It's a sensibility that seems made for the world of flying -- a place of thunderclouds and ancient promises, where biblical possibility can be undone by an F-86 gone out of control. 
   "Cassada'' is the complete reworking of a 1961 novel, "The Arm of Flesh''; this version is meant, Salter writes, "to be the book the other might have been.'' A West Point graduate and Air Force fighter pilot, Salter flew more than 100 combat missions in the Korean War. He has brought that insider knowledge -- technical, cultural, and psychological -- to "Cassada,'' which feels as exquisitely conceived as it is intensely evoked. Penetrating the closed society of Men Who Fly, the novel is a spare, sometimes stunning story of a squadron of fighter pilots stationed in postwar Europe, and of the gains and losses that make up their days. 
   Or perhaps we should say Men Who Flew, since much of the world portrayed here is a thing gone the way of absinthe and black-and-white TV. If men still fly for the same reasons they have always yearned to do so, the culture surrounding them is no longer so simple as it was in 1950s Germany -- where a flight commander like Captain Wickenden, or "Wick the prick,'' as his men call him, was more norm than exception. "He had a firm jaw and the fate of having been born in the wrong century,'' Salter writes. "The cavalry was what he was made for, riding in the dust of the Mexican border with cracked lips and a line edged into his hair from the strap of a campaign hat. Even at that he would have been longing for the old days.'' 
   So: "The Wild Bunch,'' with flight logs and Saint-Exupery rolls and dodges. "Cassada'' is as bracing and clear-cut as the Air Force culture it depicts, where the men were men, the wives were bored, and the rare trips to town were about whiskey and women and -- most important -- waiting to get back up into the sky. What keeps the novel from being a mere meticulous nostalgia piece is its interwoven story about two men lost in flight -- one, the title character, who loves the air even more than his safety in it, and Captain Isbell, his operations officer, whose "one flaw'' is being an idealist. 
   A young man from Puerto Rico full of spit and bluster, Robert Cassada is a new pilot trying to prove himself with the 44th Fighter Squadron, stationed at Giebelstadt, Germany. His squadron commander is Major Davis R. Dunning, a good-tempered bear who hopes to make Cassada into a first-rate pilot. The flight commanders and other pilots provide a classical dramatis personae, from Wickenden, who quickly becomes Cassada's Agonistes, to Godchaux and Grace, whose names (somewhat tiresomely) reflect their providential relation to the sky. Already convinced that he is a star waiting to be lit, Cassada misses all his shots in early gunnery trials, then wagers a month's salary with the best pilot in the squadron (and loses). "He has the mark of death on him,'' Wickenden tells Isbell. Already set to play godly father against Wickenden's dark adversary, Isbell teaches Cassada what he knows. "Just be ready,'' he instructs his student. "For everything you expect to be.'' 
   Returning to Germany from a week of maneuvers in Tripoli, Isbell and Cassada fly into bad weather and haven't the fuel to reconsider their destination. The plan has been a mix of desire and folly, we learn through Salter's heartstopping delivery; Isbell, watching storm clouds gather over Tripoli before they take off, knows that they signify "the thing he was meant to avoid despite any pride: the act that was indefensible, that proved nothing.'' Hoping against all reason, trying to get his men down from mobile control, Major Dunning soon realizes that he's lost communication with his ops officer -- that the voice over the radio is Cassada's, not Isbell's, whose radio has gone out. This happens early on in the luminous narrative that is "Cassada,'' and the men's terrifying flight is interspersed throughout the novel with the history and camaraderie of the men in the squadron. 
   "Cassada'' is as old-fashioned as Moses and Robert Mitchum, and there's something wonderfully consoling about that: We have perfect visibility in spotting the adulterous wife, the wounded hero, and a few other romantic elements. (What's less appealing is the brief, playing-to-type rendition of a black dialect in the first few pages.) As terse as it is deep, Salter's story does something bigger than you might expect by its gorgeous and heart-rending final pages. In its comprehension of a certain time and near-celestial enterprise, it ascends into the dangerous if heavenly realm of manmade flight, where feeling larger than life is what can save you on one day and kill you on another. But it also leaves you with something more earthbound and lasting -- where even honor and myth are scarcely a match for grief and time. "Cassada'' turns out to be a small flame that burns pure.