Economist

The Economist lead article for Jan 7th issue has an interesting insight into the current situation in the worldwide markets. Far from making any calls on stability or possible growth, it echoes comments made by many of those opposing various government attempts to create more less volatile more secure markets and leaves one with a sense of real foreboding about whether there really is a light at the end of the tunnel, or if its just another tunnel.

Rivers of Babylon, By Peter Pist’anek, trans. Peter Petro

Have just recently finished this, it really is a great book, but I’ll allow this review from The Independent introduce you to it.

Other literary links

Joanna Smith Rakoff on her adventures answering JD Salingers post.

F Scott Fitzgerald reads Shakespeare.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Here are some of my favourite 1-star reviews from Amazon.  I really love that someone would write a review and spell horribal like that, or that someone else would blame it for the presumed downfall of America.

Horribal Book, November 12, 2004

By	Earth Shadow (Pa) – See all my reviews

Ahhh! I /hated/ this book! I had to read it for school and I didn’t even finish it. Please, /never/ buy this book. It is like the plague, and should be avoided as such! *Shivers* It gives me the shivers to even think about it.

it …., January 20, 2003

By	anonymous (nc) – See all my reviews

the book is nothing but a democratic self centered view of life. i could care less about reading a book with a cry-baby wining about his life. this is the type of action that drags this country into the black hole of depression. if a book moves a person and it does not have the words holy bible on the front of it, it shows how lost the person it “moved” really is.

I am the only person in the world who didn’t read The Catcher in the Rye in her or his teens, but I thought it was good in spite of this.  I’ve been called “a gentleman and a scholar” before, but I didn’t know it was from this book (it’s meant ironically, mind you).  Everything I have ever read about the book trumpets it as a balm for disaffected youth, so I assumed it might not be actually good.  Unfortunately, the platitudes spewed because of the book’s fame obscures that it’s not just for kids full of angst and ennui, and far from it, in my opinion.  I think the fixation on its apparent subversiveness is a lazy or willful underweight reading.  It’s a reductionist reading that has been kind to him in terms of sales, of course, but I doubt that an author whose overriding concern seems to be control—control of his image, control of texts down to italicizing individual letters—would be happy with his unthinking cult following.  (Unfortunately for J.D., you can’t control your product after you’ve let it out of your hands, and better not to try—as Timberland boots or Cristal champagne have learned; perhaps that’s why he stopped publishing?)  One problem with viewing the novel only as a vehicle for Holden the everyteen is that this subjects it to young tastes, which a NYT article suggests are anti-Holden and pro-Potter.

While I’d agree that Holden is unsatisfied, he’s not some middle-American teen that can’t wait to get away to the big city.   Holden is in a position of privilege and has the ability to do almost anything, but prefers not to: he’s like a cynical son of Jay Gatsby or wannabe-badass Bartleby.  Basically I’m saying that The Catcher in the Rye isn’t Footloose (!), by which I mean there’s no point where readers can say “oh everything would be ok if he could only dance!”  In reaction to these seemingly closed possibilities for Holden, I originally thought he was awfully grown up to see and hate all the phonyness around him.  Compared to later Salinger characters, though, he’s at an intermediate stage of growing up.  Like Franny in Franny and Zooey, he’s horrified by the world as it is.  Franny, though, has Zooey to tell her to embrace the flawed embodiment of the world as is: shine your shoes even if nobody will see them—in Seymour’s words, to do it for the fat lady.

While I don’t think it’s as good as 9 stories, I also don’t think it’s as terrible as some critics have claimed.  (It’s more fun to heap scorn on a loved text than an unknown one.)  A contemporary review by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reads:

The Catcher in the Rye is now, you’ll be told just about anywhere you ask, an “American classic,” right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading The Catcher in the Rye after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger’s execrable prose and Caulfield’s jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.

Yardley faults The Catcher in the Rye for being emotionally manipulative, which might be true (Holden has a cute sister and a dead older brother), but seems peripheral most of the time: (it’s not like The Lovely Bones, where the premise of the whole book is some dramatic and exploitive violence, for example).  Another fault Yardley notes is that the writing is phony: “[Salinger's] characters forever say ‘ya’ for ‘you,’ as in ‘ya know,’ which no American except perhaps a slapstick comedian ever has said. Americans say ‘yuh know’ or ‘y’know,’ but never ‘ya know.’”  I’d say that’s hardly relevant, and that it’s a novel not a photograph.  That said, my biggest complaint against the text is related.  Phony or not, Holden is tiring to listen to.  Salinger sticks to his irritating young narrator in a way that dominates the text, something Buddy doesn’t do so completely in Franny and Zooey. I have wondered before whether it’s fair to criticize a conscious decision by the author to narrate a text via a character whose style we fault. While the narrative voice Salinger develops for The Catcher in the Rye might not be my favourite, I’ll admit that it wouldn’t be the same novel without it, so I should probably just endure the sonuvabitch of a moron.

If you’ve never read it, this cartoon pretty much sums it up.

sweater // perfume // skirt // coat // compact mirror // oxfords // purse

outfit // cigarette case // soap // shower curtain // toothpaste

clawfoot tub // shaving set // towels // letter

phonograph // chet baker vinyl // teacups // blanket // curtain // sofa

blue ribbons // cambells soup // bloomberg the cat

franny and zooey by j.d. salinger takes place in new york, november 1955. franny is a twenty year old college student in the midst of a breakdown and her brother, zooey is a twenty-five year old television actor. they are part of the glass family – as children, all seven were prodigies and on radio shows – which put them all through college. Because of salinger’s recent death and my love for his work, i decided to closely follow the descriptions in the book and i came up with this!

What was your first memory? Take a moment to think way back. For some of us, that “way back” will take a couple of moments longer than for others.

Mine is a memory of a hospital stay. I believe I was four years old and my Dad was holding me at the nurse’s station. I remember a foot-high gumdrop tree perched on the counter of the station – the sugar crystals glistening in the florescent lights. My head was cradled on my Dad’s shoulder as he swayed back and forth, rocking me to sleep.  

The crystalline sparkles of the gumdrops grew hazy as my heavy eyelids blurred my focus. A deep cramp followed by a burning heat between my legs would jar me awake – the painful call of needing to go to the bathroom. I would tense, wince and cry until the pain was gone. Then the cycle would start over until an operation would finally provide relief. To this day – hospitals don’t scare me. Nurses and needles don’t frighten me. An oncoming UTI, though, means sheer terror.

From that experience, I learned about the comfort a parent can give a child in even the most painful of times. And I learned that our level of tolerance for what life presents expands based on what we experience. At the early age of four, this one experience would be the basis for exponential growth and development. At any early age, for most of us, our experiences will shape how we perceive the world.

And so it is with writing.

Writing is experiential.

If you expect to be known as a writer, you first have to write. Common sense tells you that, right? But to only write isn’t enough. To grow as a writer, you have to share your writing or at least let your experiences shape your writing. How will you know you suck at character development but excel at building plot? You gotta try.

It may be enough for some, although I would find it a shame, to not share your writing with at least one other person. It’s scary at first but once you have a reader, you begin to experience the uncertainty and misgivings that come with putting your thoughts into words. It’s from this point that you begin to develop the foundation of writing for an audience. And, unless you’re like the late J.D. Salinger – a reclusive writer who, after cultish fame, would not have his work published – the world will begin to digest and appreciate your writing. You, in turn, will develop as a writer. It’s a cycle of learning and development that make writing a fulfilling craft.

Call me crazy…or “call me Ishmael.” I say, push your experiences and take your writing to the next level. You know…take a bite of that gumdrop and see where it leads you – then tell us all about it through your writing.

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. ………Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.” (Salinger, 157-158)

This quotation is found in chapter 16. I believe this quotation explains a great deal about Holden Caulfield’s state of mind and his perception on life. The scene takes place as Holden is headed to the museum from the park after meeting with a friend of his younger sister, Phoebe. Holden decides to go to the museum knowing very well that he will not find Phoebe there.  This clearly shows his sentiments and attachment to the museum and his past.  We get a good sense of the location and the objects he is describing, as if they were all monuments in his life through his vivacious memory. This also shows that he has certainly visited the museum enough to provide such great details, almost to the point where he has idealized it.

The museum intrigues him so much because he would like his life to revert back to what it was before.  He wants to have the same people around and his memories relived.  Like most of us, he is unwilling to accept the change his life brings him.

In the last line of the quote, he is trying to believe that he is not a part of this reality he is indeed facing.  He believes that the outside world has changed and the people in it have changed; yet he is who he has always been.

The end of the scene is no surprise where he decides not to go inside.  This is still consistent with his personality in trying to keep meaning to his life and reminisce.

I was hoping to write a much longer and carefully organised post today, but that isn’t going to happen.  I have had a few private messages after my last post and I’d like to inform everyone who has been wondering that the Jebus Fish seems to be doing very well indeed.  S/he has deepened in colour, something we’re assured is a sign of good health, keeps darting from place to place within the habitat and has a very hearty appetite.  Apparently resurrection is a calorie-intense business.  A big breakfast follows the big sleep.

Other than that, the time since my last posting has been busy and I’ve had all sorts of thoughts about potential topics flying through my head.  For example:

• The Pope’s wonderful take on the equality laws here in Britain started a number of wheels turning.  Personally I’m very concerned that equality laws might require certain people and groups to stop discriminating against others such as homosexuals.  It’s just so unfair to expect people to treat others with respect and tolerance!  It also doesn’t respect or tolerate them.  Or something.
• A number of anti-cyclist hate groups on Facebook have been brought to my attention.  Thankfully very, very, very few people belong to these groups, but the threats of vehicular violence against people pedalling away on two wheels is disturbing.
• The fact that over the past few days the ongoing response to Salinger’s passing, in the UK at least, seems to have been hi-jacked by the image of Norman Mailer.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Mailer’s work but I do find it somewhat odd that the extrovert seems to be stealing the limelight produced by the death of the recluse.  Apparently you’re still something of a loser if you want to talk about Snr. Hemingway.
• The album my wife and I received as a Christmas gift that I cannot stop listening to no matter how hard I try.  The fact that during my commute when I’m normally listening to a huge range of music I keep returning to this album, often having decided I’m going to listen to something, anything else provides some indication of precisely how much I’m enjoying it.  Earlier today I even found myself singing one of its tunes and doing a humiliating little shuffle step behind the trolley I was steering around the supermarket.  The music I was hearing in my head made me so happy I didn’t even try to stop.

Those and other topics have been occupying me in my free moments.  I may write about all, some or none of them.  If you have any desire to read more Omphaloskeptic nonsense on any of the above topics do let me know.

“People always clap for the wrong things.”

J.D  Salinger’s character, Holden Caulfield. Salinger died last week. He last appeared on this TIME magazine cover in Sept, 1961.

“Salinger never swallowed this capitalize-on-your-fame command that Simon Cowell and YouTube have turned into an American birthright.”

Author, and syndicated columnist, Mitch Albom, on Salinger’s attempt to not be famous.

“I might go to the bathroom during that ad,or make popcorn.”

Susan Estritch, commenting on the controversial ad at this year’s Super Bowl, about abortion and choice that will air among the predictable ones about job sites and Clysedales.

“The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets).”

Michael Barone, on How Climate-Change Fanatics Corrupted Science

“It’s too early to tell if this round of Facebook changes will create a backlash, but at the time of this writing there were almost 3700 mostly negative comments on the company’s blog post detailing the new homepage design.”

PC World, on Facebook’s latest round of layout changes.

Will Salinger’s work get more respect now that he’s dead? It should:

It’s hard to know how to mourn a recluse—all we have is the absence of an absence. Maybe, at least, this will be good for the one part of Salinger that never left us: his books. It strikes me as unfair that The Catcher in the Rye has come to be ghettoized, over the years, as a slightly embarrassing young-adult novel—a stick of gum to chew on your way to the big square meal of Hemingway or Fitzgerald—and that Salinger’s name is invoked most often as dismissive shorthand for the kind of self-satisfied uptown preciousness you find in, say, a bad Wes Anderson movie. Maybe this second layer of absence—his new, permanent, involuntary invisibility—will bring people back to the living richness of his work.

J.D. Salinger died on my birthday, January 29, 2010. He was 91. I heard about his passing from a dear friend that I have known since grammar school. I recall acting scenes from Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” in our high school English class and upsetting our teacher because we included his obscenities.

It was a different time. But Salinger’s work and legacy appear timeless, and it was with great joy that I read his obituary in the online New York Times today. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/books/29salinger.html

I am impressed on two levels–first, the historical accounting of Salinger’s “reclusive life” is impeccable. According to the Times, Salinger served in World War II and was married twice. I saw another obit about him on CBS’s Sunday Morning, which was interesting but not as thorough and accurate. Obituaries are one of the oldest forms of news, and I believe this story is journalism at its best. Maybe we’re simply present day historians? What also makes this story so elegant and interesting is the interactive map of Holden’s wandering through Manhattan (complete with links to Salinger’s writing) and relevant links including Joyce Maynard’s “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back On Life,” which
spawned their ensuing love affair.
So is Journalism today’s history, literature, or an engaging combination of these and other elements? I simply think this worked for me and perhaps the fat lady, too.
Christine M. Tracy

I am so close to finishing* my manuscript that I’m giddy. Giddy! It helps that I love revising; turns out this is my favorite part of the process. Everything is right there on the page and all I have to do is make it better!

But. Enough of me being overly excited (especially since the hard part — getting this sucker published — hasn’t even begun). Links!

• Literary agent Kristin offers some good insight into Why Prologues Often Don’t Work. Make sure yours doesn’t fall into one of these categories!

• An Op-Ed in the New York Times by Jenny Finney Boylan on Salinger and the public life of writers. Boylan was a professor of mine at Colby College! Woot!

• At The Murdock Editing Blog, advice about including enough but not too much backstory in memoir. “Trust the reader to find his or her own connections,” the editor writes.

• Writer Suzanne Westover explains how she felt when publishers rejected her book. This is one of my new favorite blogs.

• Tips on writing the Competitive Analysis section of your book proposal, from literary agent Chip MacGregor. Thinking about the purpose of this section helps, he says.

• A guest post at Guide to Literary Agents on tips for Author Platform and the Debut of your Book. Broken down by fiction and non-fiction, and for memoir I’d say you could do it all.

• Lisa Romeo says she gets more writing done when she has less time. Me too.

• This Awesome Foundation grant might be worth applying for. Via Mira’s List.

• Some good examples of log lines and book summaries at Literary Rambles. Also links on how to write them.

• Why some memoirs are better as fiction, from The Daily Beast. Not sure I buy this, but it’s food for thought.

• Great post on Writer Unboxed about How to get a book deal while avoiding the slush pile. “Find a way to create your own success,” Jane Friedman writes.

Have a great weekend, y’all!

*When I say finished, I mean as good as I can make it, ready to be sent out to agents. We all know that if I land an agent and publisher, I’ll probably face many more revisions.

I could say I gave it a week to sink in, but that would be lying. The truth is, the death of JD Salinger didn’t impact me. I didn’t run to my friends with the news, haven’t mentioned it over a dinner table conversation.

He didn’t know me, and I didn’t know him. To tell the honest truth, he embarrassed me a bit. I loved CATCHER IN THE RYE, and NINE STORIES is my favourite collection of short stories. I suspect it will remain so, even into middle age. I’m even mulling the idea of using it for my EE. But he wasn’t a hero to me, like John Green or Elie Wiesel.

JD Salinger was a selfish recluse (I suppose we all are: he just lacked the shame which would have told him that it was unacceptable). He wrote brief works of startling beauty but hated the attention they garnered and the incessant analysis that everyone loved to cut his words with. Salinger took wives decades his junior, then neglected them while banging out new works in locked rooms. Those works never saw the light of day; perhaps they will now.

So RIP, Jerome David Salinger. I will not miss you, because you are not gone. You are the words on your pages – the ones you fought so hard to remove from the shelves.

Holden Caulfield grew up, I can only hope that you allowed yourself the same reward.

So JD Salinger died. I got one real and one snarky email about it. The Onion did their article in the style of Holden Caulfield. Holden’s voice, at this point, has passed from the tragedy to the farce side of Marx’s dichotomy. It’s only phonies that use it anyways, if you want my honest opinion, if you want my true and honest opinion.

I read Catcher too late, too old. I could appreciate the book but it was more like a Mondrian painting than a novel, the way I appreciated it. Mostly the quality of the lines, the perceptive intelligence that had put each one in its place–not so much the picture they were drawing, but I could tell it wasn’t what Salinger cared about either. A good book, not my favorite. Yglesias was basically right about it, I think.

Anyways, 9 stories is one of my favorite books ever, one of the most intelligent, most accomplished. I wish I had written every story in there. Esme, especially. But somewhere in the first fifty pages of 9 stories an idea came into my head: What if Salinger was a pedophile? I don’t necessarily think this is true, just that it’s an intriguing premise…the strong connection with children in the stories, the entirety of ‘Bananafish,’ the entirety of ‘Esme,’ Holden himself–and the seclusion, the hermitude…

[Why do I feel bad about what I just wrote/Why have I written it anyway? I'm intrigued by the way our perception of an author's life story affects our perception of their work, I guess. Imagine if you switched the life and works of Sylvia Plath and Ayn Rand. We'd read each very differently. And Salinger's seclusion has, for better or worse, become part of the story about his books--If fitzgerald had wrote Catcher, we wouldn't take either seriously. But Salinger's distance, his mystery--they make a clean joist with what we think we know about his writing. Each suggest disdain, perfectionism which cannot be sated by the messy world. So that's one story we can tell ourselves about Salinger, and one I think many people are implicitly telling about him: he was too good, too sensitive, too perfect a writer for the world. And it isn't a bad story. But if the story were written by a different writer, by a Nabokov, perhaps, there would be something in the story beyond mere artistic integrity, some reason to hide. If Occam wrote the story, too, there would be a simpler reason to retire from the world than purity. Is it a better story? To answer this, we'd have to be sure about the implications of Salinger's fiction in our own lives, and the importance of their origins as we consider them therein, neither of which I can say much about.]

Salon ran a slide show of the succession of book jackets that have covered the brilliance that was “Catcher in the Rye.” i love the abstractness of the Italian edition but my all time favorite jacket is the one i own (photo shown below).

i can’t help but think that Mr. Salinger would approve of my dog-eared copy. In fact, he probably would have thought, “yeah, that’s about right.”

If you’re tuning in for the best of the Big Read, prepare for a disappointment.  This week, there is genuine news from book world: Salinger is dead. By Hattie French

Of course the news reports have gone on and on about two things only: the classic status (with occasional plot summaries) of The Catcher in the Rye, and Salinger’s notorious hermit-like existence.

Two things wrong with this approach, in my view:

Number one…

Firstly and obviously, Salinger already has a backlog of spinning to do when he is eventually buried – as the last thing (presumably) he would have wanted was for his name, face, and personal habits to be broadcast internationally.  I saw one report which discussed the man’s habit of eating peas in water for breakfast.  The press vultures had stripped the whole story to the bones within twenty-four hours of Salinger’s death and moved on to the next, with no apparent sense of irony.

The irony deficiency is what rendered the whole affair distasteful in my eyes.  If Paxman had done just one snarky comment on Newsnight about how much Salinger would have hated all this fuss, it would have been acceptable.

Instead they had Jay McInerney describing Salinger’s lifestyle as “increasingly concerned with yoga, with a succession of quasi-religious … and dietary enthusiasms” and Will Self mentioning his taste for “younger and younger lovers”.  Still, Salinger’s not complaining, I suppose, so why should I?

Number two…

The second objectionable thing about the reporting of Salinger’s death was the hyperbolic eulogies being mouthed for The Catcher in the Rye.  Now there’s an overrated, overread novelette for you.  It has the virtues of being short, easy to read, and turning up on must-read-before-you-die lists, so it’s sold approximately 65,000,000 copies – about ten million per decade,

"adolescent gestalt"

on average.

I’ve read it, and I was frankly disappointed.  What’s so special about Holden Caulfield?  He’s just another teenager wrestling with self-loathing and egomania and puberty.  So he has a lucid and identifiable narrative voice, so he speaks for the “eternal adolescent gestalt“.  So what?  Teenage angst is, on the whole, pretty one-dimensional and quickly loses any appeal (unless you’re a teenager, in which case, commiserations and good luck).

Salinger not worth his salt

No, I don’t think Salinger was a remarkable writer.  For one thing, his other works are damned with faint praise, and he seems to have run through his store of subject matter pretty quickly.  I’d say Salinger’s retreat from the world was at least partly due to his failure to live up to expectations after Catcher.

I suppose in 1951 it was all a bit bold and shocking – the swearing, the prostitutes, the rebelliousness.  Sixty years later that’s nothing. Read The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks and eventually you’ll reach a scene where a man has dug his own fly-blown brain out with a spoon.  And in my view this is a better book than Catcher, although both star disturbed adolescents trying to exert control on their worlds, and failing.  The Wasp Factory has a plot, with twists and developed characters and murders and everything.  The Catcher in the Rye has nothing that I’d call a plot. Just lots of mooching and discontent.

Moreover, Iain Banks is going strong on 24 top-notch novels and has created a rich futuristic universe in the Culture series.  No shortage of ideas there.

A better class of adolescent…

I’d pick Iain Banks over J.D. Salinger every time.  If you don’t fancy The Wasp Factory (and who could blame you), try The Crow Road.  It’s much funnier and less grisly (although the opening line is, famously, “It was the day my grandmother exploded“).  It’s so intricately plotted that I’ve read it repeatedly and yet it surprises me every time with its depth.  And the central character, Prentice, is a masterful portrait of a young man struggling with family, university life, and his obsession with his dazzling second cousin Verity.  Oh, and a mysterious disappearance.

Like a lot of people, I count The Crow Road as my favourite novel by Banks – one of my all-time, top-ten favourite books, in fact – and it’s definitely more rewarding to read than The Catcher in the Rye.  Mind you, so are a lot of things.  Rest in peace, J.D. Salinger 1919-2010, now the reporters are finished with you.

updated

Readers will note that I’ve posted quite a bit about J. D. Salinger. I’m really interested to hear what others have to say about him and his work.

Gay Talese (see below) provides It’s important to understand the cultural context in which Salinger came up.

In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the United States was in the midst of one of its periodic literary flowerings, and Salinger was part of it, along with Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron and others. Like them he had been in the military service in World War II, but unlike them, he did not write about the war in Asia or the war at home. And unlike them he didn’t write massive novels.

He knew how to compress, how to convey more of a sense of wisdom with fewer words, and to be poetic. In his books, he brought the country away from wartime to peacetime, though he also showed us a country that was troubled; teenagers, like Holden Caulfield, were alienated, and the grown-ups felt alienated and alone, too, and sometimes even suicidal. “The Catcher in the Rye” presented life on a human scale, without big armies and big bureaucracies, and so it touched the innermost folds of the human heart.

Without understanding that, it’s hard to understand the impression he left on his first admirers (which in turn cemented his reputation going forward, because it was his first fans who disseminated him into the wider culture. People in a position to spread his work [mostly Catcher] did so because they remembered the experience of bonding with Holden Caulfield, or, if they were serious readers [or writers themselves], of wondering how he could get away with breaking so many rules of conventional narrative and still hold our undivided attention, often to the point of mesmerization.

More on cultural context from Gay Talese:

Word got around that there was a story in the works that was going to be published soon, and we waited for it. … It was still the era of Eisenhower. And yet it was a kind of beginning of a kind of identity with youth—it wasn’t a youth movement, as would happen later with the Beatles and Bobby Dylan and the war protests of the ’60s and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and all that stuff—but there was really something that gave identity to young people in the work of Salinger. A sort of an epochal time for the printed word.

I don’t remember anything before it, because I was too young to know anything before it—when Hemingway was around. It was the Sundance of the short story in those days. People really wanted to be writers. We didn’t give a shit about Oscars, it seemed to me. It was the literary word, and the printed word—it was the quintessential time for the printed word.

So this was the seedbed:  it was the golden age of the printed word, when everyone wanted to be a writer. But wait! There’s more!

Salinger was a person of the ’50s. He is a product of the pre-Kennedy time. I mean, that was the period of being old. It’s the last of “I like Ike” and playing golf, and here’s this new voice, and it’s a young voice. Here comes this voice not of protest but of a most uncommon character. … And it really seemed to be the first legitimate young American voice on the printed page that had all the power and song of what would later be in the words of Bobby Dylan, or the Beatles, or the music of Motown.

Salinger offered the sound of a new generation from the printed page at a time when all eyes were on writers as the artists everyone envied. Then there was the viral character of the advance word-of-mouth about him—which in itself was unusual for the times.

Before Tina Brown thought of buzz, there was this buzz. I’d never heard any word of mouth on an about-to-be-published short story … .  It never happened with Roth or Updike or Don DeLillo or anybody [else].

Then there was a conversation! There was a debate. Half an evening’s meal was spent discussing this. This was very much what was going on. …—you heard about Salinger. Nothing was quite like it. I don’t think we had another person. And Salinger was not self-promoting—the opposite. That’s what so special. It was all about his work.

Buzz all about his work? Unheard-of!

That’s because with Salinger, it was all about the writing. Talese concludes:

The stories—“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Love and Squalor”—I mean, I read all these stories six times when they came out. I’d read them again and again and again. They’re just beautiful.

You couldn’t dare think that voice would be something of your own voice. It was a special voice, not to be imitated—or that you could even think that you understood fully what was in that brain of his. But you loved the fact that he was saying something that you could identify with. It wasn’t that his language was so evocative—he just had control of his story and his era. He just was a new man on the planet. And he carried us away.

Yep. And some people long to be carried away to that planet again, and so they hope that there are more Salinger stories and that their author will have made provisions for their posthumous publication.

In writing about Salinger, some wear their heart on their sleeve. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Adam Gopnik [emphasis added]:

Critics fretted about the growing self-enclosure of Salinger’s work, about a faith in his characters’ importance that sometimes seemed to make a religion of them. But the isolation of his later decades should not be allowed to obscure his essential gift for joy. The message of his writing was always the same: that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unself-conscious innocence that still surround us (with the hovering unease that one might mistake emptiness for innocence, as Seymour seems to have done with his Muriel). It resides in the particular things that he delighted to record. In memory, his writing is a catalogue of those moments: Esmé’s letter and her broken watch; and the little girl with the dachshund that leaps up on Park Avenue, in “Zooey”; and the record of “Little Shirley Beans” that Holden buys for Phoebe (and then sees break on the pavement); and Phoebe’s coat spinning on the carrousel at twilight in the December light of Central Park; and the Easter chick left in the wastebasket at the end of “Just Before the War with the Eskimos”; and Buddy, at the magic twilight hour in New York, after learning from Seymour how to play Zen marbles (“Could you try not aiming so much?”), running to get Louis Sherry ice cream, only to be overtaken by his brother; and the small girl on the plane who turns her doll’s head around to look at Seymour. That these things were not in themselves quite enough to hold Seymour on this planet—or enough, it seems, at times, to hold his creator entirely here, either—does not diminish the beauty of their realization. In “Seymour: An Introduction,” Seymour, thinking of van Gogh, tells Buddy that the only question worth asking about a writer is “Were most of your stars out?” Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.

* For you Catcher in the Rye fans: Walking in Holden’s Footsteps, an interactive map of Holden’s Manhattan.

*Still trying to decide what to make of this website, but at first glance, it’s an extremely comprehensive collection of all things Salinger; summaries of all his works, uncollected works, biographical information, etc. The Glass family page is especially helpful, for those interested.

*A collection of articles/essays in The New Yorker. Adam Gopnik’s essay is brief but beautiful, pointing out that “the isolation of his later decades should not be allowed to obscure his essential gift for joy“. Yes, Salinger withdrew from society and chose to live a hermit-like lifestyle; but he did not withdraw from observing the world, its inhabitants, and the beauty and meaning found in the details of every-day life (see the last paragraph of Gopnik’s essay for wonderful examples). Gopnik’s tribute is an honest look at an author who created some of the most honest characters in literature.  It would be difficult not to appreciate Salinger after reading this…so please read it.

More to come…but can you see why I love this guy? He was able to describe what it feels like to feel too much. Zooey, and Seymour: An Introduction, and Hapworth 16, 1924, and most of Nine Stories; these are all tough to read, because they’re packed with feeling and frustration and proof that living an examined life can be flat-out hard (and isolating…which he almost encourages via Holden’s “don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody“).  But boy, is it worth it. To have lived with “your stars out“, to “shoot for some kind of perfection, and on [your] own terms, not anyone else’s“, and to get busy living, because “the goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around“.

Welcome to the Nine Stories discussion post! Remember, those interested in entering the drawing for the beautiful Penguin Clothbound Classic must participate in at least one discussion before February 25. Next week, our classic will be The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, but for now, let’s discuss the Salinger:

Salinger has a distinct style to his writing, the most prominent features of which are abrupt endings and the frequent use of italics. Are these techniques distracting for you, or do you feel as though they enhance the reading experience? What do you think Salinger was trying to accomplish through these techniques?

Anyone who has read The Catcher in the Rye has probably experienced the frustration of the total lack of closure on the ending; Salinger’s characters always seem to leave the stories just as broken, if not more so, than they entered them. Salinger may, of course, be using this abruptness as a way to make the reader sit up and pay attention.

Take, for example, the ending of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Seymour’s suicide almost seems to come out of nowhere, and a reread is almost compulsory in order to piece the elements of the story together in a way that makes sense. I’ve read this story almost ten times over the years and I still don’t know what it means — but you can bet that I have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out, and I think that’s what Salinger intended.

As for the italics, I personally love them. The New York Times said that Salinger “used italics almost as a form of musical notation,” and they certainly convey the natural rhythms of human speech of the 1950’s. You can practically hear Salinger’s characters talking as you’re reading, stress patterns and all.

Salinger had a great deal of respect for Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as writers. Do you see the influence of these writers in any of these stories specifically? In what ways is Salinger the Fitzgerald of his era?

Like Hemingway, Salinger was a solider who later used his wartime experiences as material for his writing. Staff Sergeant X in “For Esme — With Love and Squalor” reminds me of the solider in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. While Salinger doesn’t share Hemingway’s dedication to word economy, I believe they share a refusal to compromise when it comes to portraying the psychological realities of war.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote that Fitzgerald question, but I suppose some of Salinger’s stories (e.g. “The Young Folks”) share a sense of cynical booziness with Fitzgerald’s work. Also, Holden Caulfield’s regard for Jane Gallagher is a little reminiscent of Gatsby’s love for Daisy. Can anyone think of a better answer? Please, I’m begging!

Which story in this collection was your favorite? Why? (If you didn’t like any of these stories, you can talk about why, or if you feel Salinger’s novel was superior to the stories, you can talk about that too.)

Oh, I love “For Esme — With Love and Squalor,” though my heart truly belongs to The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger, at heart, is a short story writer. Though that propensity is clearer in his uncollected stories, each of the stories in this collection is a tiny snapshot of life in the 1950’s, beautiful in the way that sometimes a particularly fine minature is more wonderful than a life-sized portrait.

“For Esme” is beautiful because of its contrast between innocence and experience. Salinger does this well in “Down by the Dinghy,” but “For Esme” has a poignancy that the other story doesn’t, probably because Salinger had been a solider and thus had a little bit more solid foundation for the story.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” – The Catcher in the Rye

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. has installed a portrait of writer J. D. Salinger. The image chosen was created by Robert Vickery, and first appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1961.The author, best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye, passed away last week.

Cliched as it might be, The Catcher in the Rye is my favourite novel. I finished the book in a day, and laughed so much throughout that my brother picked it up as well. I was in awe that a book with such contemporary language was published in 1951. His work will no doubt continue to inspire, not least of them director Wes Anderson. Finally, I must use this opportunity to recommend his short story Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. A beautiful read.

stephwereley

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961)

More 1-star reviews on Amazon (I just can’t get enough of this wonderful stuff):

Franny and Zooey was a bad piece of American Literature, December 22, 1998 By A Customer

wHERE SHOULd I start well how about this book sucked. Boys and Girls don’t waste your time. Never once in my reading was I even closed to becoming entertanined. I hated it because it was boring had no point and most importantly wasted my time, and if you read it it will waste your time. J.D.Ss the Catcher in the Raye was a great book read that one. If you have to read this book in school boy it sucks to be you. The only reason I gave this book one star was because that was the lowest grade I could of given it. I would of given this book 1/4 of star because I like the title of the book. Remember don’t waste your time do something else ok

The View of a High School Senior, January 8, 1999 By A Customer

Franny and Zooey was the worst book I have ever read. It is full of pointless dialogue that takes the reader weeks to understand and leaves him completely unsatisfied.

Franny and Zooey is an odd text: the combination of parts (20% Franny, 80% Zooey) is surprisingly uneven given the title (but something that occurs again in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction).  I didn’t realize until I began reading that Zooey is a male name (in the 50s, anyway).  Also, I was at first thinking it would be a Thelma and Louise thing, or Bonnie and Clyde—some kind of partners in crime, and I suppose that’s true (considering “Zooey” is one long conversation between the two), but it’s definitely not a rollicking road novel; if you consider the discussion of  The Way of the Pilgrim (could it be ignored?)  this novel is kind of like a brief stop on the side of the road to look at a spiritual map.

“Franny” (1955) is a good story even on its own, but I don’t feel it’s as good as most of the 9 stories.  It seems to me that the opening is the strongest, but that I have minor criticisms that begin to mount at the restaurant.  In this story (published later than any of the 9 Stories) Salinger doesn’t leave us as much to discover, but that he tells us what we’re just piecing together for ourselves.  (As a completely unrelated example, take 3: 35 from this scene in Dead Man. At that moment, I’m sure lots of watchers thing “hey a nimbus!  I know Christian art and am a genius!”  Unfortunately, at 4: 53 Jarmusch reveals that even a barely literate mercenary could tell you that.)  It’s possible that neither Jarmusch or Salinger is trying to be condescending, though, but trying to gloss obvious things to draw us to more striking observations: by saying “yes, obviously this means this” to some of the more mundane observations, Salinger is indicating that we have to think harder—or he thinks we aren’t as smart as we were when we were reading 9 Stories.  Another question, though: why do things in this story keep happening “literally”?  “Franny literally jumped” when Lane asked her about her book, &c., &c.  In the Dubliners story “The Dead,” when the first sentence explains how Lily was “literally” run off her feet, this is glossed as free indirect discourse: is everything happening “literally” in this story because that’s how Franny speaks?

Even if it wasn’t several times as long, or quite difficult, Zooey (1957) would be a much more difficult text to read simply because of Buddy’s style.  I initially found the formal introduction excruciating, and I still feel that it’s quite indulgent (but I will grant it could be argued necessary for the characterization of Buddy Glass).  Maybe Buddy should update his style: “the general reader will no doubt jump to the heady conclusion that the writer of the letter and I are one and the same person.  Jump he will, and, I’m afraid, jump he should.”  Aarg.  He writes like I imagine self-made Manchester coal barons of 1838 would.  Even allowing that this is the antiquated style of an academic, perhaps it’s not the idiom to adopt for the whole story?  Provided we can blame Buddy for the wild digressiveness of the writing (footnotes, even!) and endure a while, the digressiveness seems to diminish after pg. 90 (the ending of torment punctuated by a very long sentence).

Stylistic criticism aside, though, I don’t have much to say: it’s a difficult text.  I know an absolutely committed atheist who refuses to accept even the vaguest of gods who likes this book, which seems irreconcilable to me.  I don’t know what to take away from it besides an argument for mysticism in spite of having to exist in the world.  It’s hard for me to think original thoughts about it now because I watched a very good lecture (available at iTunes, or simply on Youtube) that discusses the book as a combination of syncretic religious text and a love story.  I think it’s hilarious that young people would read The Catcher in the Rye and then Franny and Zooey and be furious on reading this one.  ’Serves them right for thinking The Catcher in the Rye was about them.

In honour of J.D. Salinger, author of the immensely influential classic The Catcher in the Rye,  the New Yorker magazine’s book blog The Book Bench has posted a series of remembrances: ranging from the analytical to the anecdotal. (Among them you will find an essay by Dave Eggers, author of  the novel The Wild Things which is based on the picture book Where the Wild Things Are by ALMA-recipent Maurice Sendak.)

A great case of crossover literature, The Catcher in the Rye was first published for adults, but has been immensely influential with generations of adolecent readers since it was first published in 1951.

YT’s BBC interview on J.D. Salinger last Saturday, in Russian; start 24-25 minutes into the program:    http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/radio/2009/04/000000_radio_5etazh.shtml