When George Plimpton and his circle of rich young American expatriates founded The Paris Review, in 1953, Salter was still a fighter pilot in the Air Force. But his third novel, published fourteen years later, reads like the ultimate erotic fantasia of Plimpton's louche postwar set. The book's hero, a Yale dropout in possession of nothing but a convertible that he may not even own, seduces a young woman in a small town in central France. After a slow start, the narrative follows their affair in terms explicit enough to still count as startling.
