Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Then I thought of something, all of a sudden.  "Hey, listen," I said.  "You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South?  That little lake?  Do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over?  Do you happen to know, by any chance?"  I realized it was only one chance in a million.

Holden Caulfield--what an insufferable jerk, right?  Either that or the very essence of what it means to be a disillusioned teenager.  Catcher in the Rye never fails to bring out a strong response, sometimes negative, sometimes positive.  I regret to say that I see a lot more of the former among kids Holden's age these days.  I've never taught the book myself (though I will next year, which is, like Hamlet, why I'm re-reading it now), but I've known kids who've read it, and for whatever reason, most kids don't want to see themselves in Holden.

I get it, of course.  No kid in 2013, especially in 2013, would ask a question like, "Do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over?"  Holden is immature, callow, and unrealistic, despite his champions' attempts to turn him into some sort of cynical saint.  But I think that both of these approaches are wrong-headed.  Why is it that we feel the need to turn Holden into a symbol of youth, instead of letting him be what he is: a complicated, fragile, and achingly "real" character?

This is the first time I've read Catcher in the Rye--which details Holden's adventures in NYC during the few days between getting kicked out of his prestigious prep school and returning home--since reading Salinger's other works, Franny and Zooey; Seymour: An Introduction; Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters; and Nine Stories.  Salinger suggests (I forget in which book--probably Seymour) that Buddy, a member of the Glass family that recurs throughout Salinger's non-Catcher works, is the author of Catcher.  This suggestion, I think, makes Catcher doubly rich and complex.  In this light, Catcher becomes not merely the profile of a single troubled young man but a complement to the Glass stories; Holden becomes an analogue for Buddy; Holden's sister Phoebe becomes an analogue for Zooey; Holden's deceased brother, Allie, becomes an analogue for Seymour, the suicide*.

What I mean is not merely that the books become a match-up game.  What it reveals for me is the way that Holden, far from being overly dramatic and trivial as his detractors suggest, is beset with anxiety about death.  There's Allie's death, of course, and his baseball mitt covered in poetry that is Holden's prized possession.  There's the story of James Castle, who borrows Holden's turtleneck sweater before jumping out a window to his death.  It's a small passage, easy to lose in the larger narrative of Catcher, but isn't it interesting the way that Buddy Glass, if we think of the book as his creation, must process his feelings about Seymour's death by splitting it into two concrete elements: a dead brother and a suicide?  Of course, you don't need to understand that aspect of Catcher to see the connection between the dead Allie and the figure in Holden's sweater bleeding out onto the concrete, to understand what Holden cannot put words to: that these deaths are inextricably tied to him.

I want to think about those things before we dismiss Holden's idealistic visions of "catching" the children who run through the rye.  No wonder that Holden is so protective of Phoebe; if he can keep her from being corrupted by adulthood, perhaps he can protect her from death.  Phoebe's precociousness, that which makes her seem older than her age--like Seymour's, like Holden's, like Esme's in "For Esme, with Love and Squalor"--is suffused with the reality of death.  What is Holden's obsession with the ducks in Central Park but a death-anxiety, a fear of the ultimate abandonment?  Or what about this:

Anyway, I kept walking and walking up Fifth Avenue, without any tie on or anything.  Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening.  Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddamn curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street.  I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again.  Boy, did it scare me.  You can't imagine.  I started sweating like a bastard--my whole shirt and underwear and everything.  Every time I'd get to the end of a block I'd make believe I was talking to my brother Allie.  I'd say to him, "Allie, don't let me disappear.  Allie, don't let me disappear.  Please, Allie."

Down, down, down and nobody'd ever see me again.  Holden is the catcher, but he needs Allie to catch him before he disappears--and, of course, the ultimate irony is that the only ones who know enough about the great mystery of death to help you are the ones who you can never reach.

*Note: In Slate, Ron Rosenbaum pleads with the Salinger estate to publish any unreleased works, in part to redeem Salinger for the Seymour works, which Rosenbaum finds insufferable and tedious.  I don't think he could be more wrong about that, but I hope that he gets whet he wants all the same.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

She thought sometimes that, after all, this was the happiest time of her life--the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless t o fly to those lands with sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of laziness most suave. In post-chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up steep roads, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa terraces above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring forth happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills?

Critic James Wood writes, "Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him." Wood argues that modern realist begins here, with the author of Madame Bovary, with its carefully chosen detail and the way that observation is refracted through the lens of its characters. Flaubert famously searched for le bon mot, the perfect word, perfectly arranged. Knowing all this, I was nerdily excited to read Madame Bovary.

And, of course, Wood isn't wrong; what Flaubert does in many places is exceptional. Emma, the titular Madame Bovary, is fully realized and expressive. The writing is meticulously mannered, and Flaubert manages to say very much with a very limited arsenal of literary tools.

But for all this, I had a lot of trouble caring about Madame Bovary. I am not one who needs a thrilling, action-packed book, but I couldn't help but feeling that the plot here was exceptionally dull. The focus is on Emma Bovary, the wife of a mediocre doctor living in a rural French town called Yonville-D'Abbaye. Emma loves romantic fiction, and quickly realizes that her marriage simply can't live up to the whirlwind, exciting Parisian romances of her favorite books. She seeks release in two separate affairs, one with a dashing rake named Rodolphe and another with a mild-mannered clerk named Leon. These unfold in the manner that affairs do, with secret meetings, banal lies, and the like, and the entire time we are aware that neither of these feel quiet about Emma the way that they do about her. Perhaps I am just weary of adultery stories--after all, Bovary was roundly criticized as glorifying adultery when it came out, so it was then sort of unique--but my attention flagged. The final chapters of the book stand out as an exception, in which the extravagant bills that Emma has stockpiled in service of her affairs come to a head, and the prospect of financial ruin drives her to desperate acts.

Perhaps also I am just not the right audience. Bovary has been praised for capturing perfectly the manners and attitudes of the French bourgeois, which I suppose it does--I have nothing by way of comparison--but I admit that, try as I might, I cannot make myself care about the manners and attitudes of the French bourgeois.

So let me address one aspect I did find interesting: How are we meant to see Emma? Emma is certainly tragic in that she is undone by her own flaws; her fatuous attachment to romance is what leads her to expense, which leads to her downfall. For example, when Leon suggests that they might be happier in a smaller, less expensive hotel, Emma objects, unable to fathom anything short of the sort of opulence she reads about. Uncharitable audiences might find her character repulsive. I admit that this is my first reaction, as well--her disaffection is understandable, but her husband Charles is at his heart a good man and she treats him cruelly. Yet, there were no options available for a rural doctor's wife to escape her situation in nineteenth-century France, and many have seen Emma as a proto-feminist heroine.

Flaubert once famously remarked, "Je suis Madame Bovary!"--I am Madame Bovary! Reflecting on this, I recalled something I had said to Brent about Catcher in the Rye: That perhaps those who rejected the book because of Holden's character flaws were being willfully ignorant of the same tendencies in themselves. Who of us has not felt like Emma, imagined ourselves in a favorite book, or imagined a scene in our lives that more resembled a movie? Emma's defining characteristic is an aspect of ourselves writ large, and for this I think we ought to show the same empathy that Flaubert does.

Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger

Also reviewed by Brooke and Carlton.

Salinger continues to amaze me with just how much he can do with so little. The 200-odd pages of Franny and Zooey contain less plot than I think any book I've ever read: Franny meets her boyfriend and they eat at a restaurant, where she collapses. The next day, she is recuperating at home where her mother convinces her brother, Zooey, to have a conversation with her. That's it. And yet Salinger is able to give forty- and fifty-page conversations the unmistakeable patina of reality that writers work for decades to capture.

I think what impresses me most is that the characters are not ordinary--Franny and Zooey are members of the Glass Family (elsewhere investigated by Salinger in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and the underrated "Down at the Dinghy"), and as children were noted intellectuals who appeared on a radio program called "It's a Wise Child." As I've noted before, a lot of Salinger's work has a common theme running through it: the tendency of precocious children to grow into neurotic and unstable adults. Franny's collapse is brought on by an obsession with the "Jesus Prayer," a ritualistic prayer meant to be repeated over and over until the heart and mind are in communion with the lips. Zooey is brilliant and physically attractive, as well as a successful actor, but is emotionally distant and has difficulty communicating genuinely with his family.

Salinger's opus is really something to be hold, and though his literary output is small I think that each of his three books that I've read really deepens my understanding of the others--even Catcher in the Rye, itself not about any member of the Glass family, is supposedly written by one of the Glass brothers, Buddy (as well as several of Salinger's non-Glass stories). I think that much of that is probably revisionism, but it neatly supplies a physical thread that excuses the thematic simialrity of all of Salinger's work: when we view Holden Caulfield, who is incapable of dealing fully with the death of his older brother Allie, as the creation of Buddy Glass, brother of a suicide, we begin to understand the depth of Buddy's grief, which is only glanced at otherwise. I can't say that Franny and Zooey is my favorite of Salinger's stuff--in fact I think it suffers severely upon comparison to Catcher and Nine Stories--but I love it for the way it enhances my understanding of those books, and in turn is enhanced by them.

Note: My copy of this book was once owned by Michael Peterson, a wealthy North Carolina man infamously convicted of killing his wife five or six years ago. I left that in a bar and had to borrow another copy from Nathan. Maybe the book is cursed?