Hath not a Jew eyes: Salter as (Jewish) American novelist

So James Salter is a Member of the Tribe. Who knew? Welcome to the club, James Horowitz. Hard to even begin to think of Salter as a Jewish-American novelist, but I guess that's what he is, whether he likes it or not. I know, I know - Roth himself, in the recent documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked bristles at the handle Jewish-American writer, arguing correctly that he is an American writer - but he also clearly writes about his experience and consciousness as Jewish American from a particular time and place. What to make of Salter, who adopted the patronym as what he calls (in feature in current New Yorker) a "ring name"? I can fully understand why he would need anonymity when writing, and publishing,  about his fellow flyboys during the Korean War. And he does write about his experience and consciousness, just as Roth (and Bellow, and Mailer, and Woody Allen, and Allen Ginssburg, et al. have done), but his is not really, or so it seems, a Jewish experience: he writes about wartime, about the art and act of flying, about wealthy suburbanites on the Hudson (some Jews among them, true, but as outsiders, if I remember correctly) - and these do seem to be points along the axis of his life. And let me also say, though ethnicity-hiding noms de plume kind of bother me, I also recognize that to me the world's greatest living artist and my artistic hero and favorite by far performing artist is not known to the world as Bobby Zimmerman. OK, that said, there does seem to be an element of hiding and self-loathing in Salter's fiction, which now I think I understand a little better. He is without question, as all reviews and articles note, among the finest stylists of the English language. Yet, as articles also note, he's been tagged forever as a "writer's writer" (Baumgarten in the NYer jokingly says a "writer's writer's writer") and reviewers are puzzled by his lack of fame. But it's obvious that readers don't buy or love books because of great sentences and phrases (though writers do); readers love books with great plot and characters (when that coincides, then you have a true classic: One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Known World, The Leopard, to name modern/contemporary examples). I haven't read enough of Salter to figure this out for sure, but despite his beautiful writing and his elegant settings, Salter's characters can be narcissistic and self-indulgent, privileged and pampered, that is, dislikable (I'm thinking here of Light Years, which I have posted on elsewhere on this blog). I will go back to him, however; I remember loving some stories (from Dusk, I think) that I'd read many years ago, so maybe stories are his forte - or maybe I'll try another one of his novels. I'd be glad to welcome him into the Pantheon, or even the shul.