The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy.  Somebody'd written "Fuck you" on the wall.  It drove me damn near crazy.  I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them--all cockeyed, naturally--what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.  I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it.  I figured it was some perverty bum that'd sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall.  I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how I'd smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody.  But I knew, too, I wouldn't have the guts to do it.  I knew that.

Yesterday, millions of young people from all over the world took part in an international climate strike.  They left school, or didn't show up, in order to march and demonstrate, to remind their elders, those with power, who exactly would be left holding the bag when climate change ravages the earth.  It was really something to see.  On Twitter--I'm not going to link it--I saw a guy remark, "They're fortunate I'm not their teacher. Anyone skipping class today without a legitimate doctor's note would get a zero averaged into their grade."  When pressed, he elaborated, saying, "Kids don't HAVE choices.  They're kids."  To which I say, yeah, any kid should count themselves fortunate not to have that guy as a teacher.

Of course, that guy probably doesn't believe in climate change in the first place.  But there are plenty of people, including teachers, who think like this: the process of "getting an education" is so important that there is no valid reason to not be in school ever, as if informed citizenship and activism weren't what education is meant to lead kids toward in the first place.

It made me think of Spencer, Holden Caulfield's history teacher at Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye.  Holden, having been expelled from Pencey, goes to say goodbye to him, which Spencer uses as an occasion to hector Holden about his study habits.  He reminds him of a crappy essay he wrote about Egypt, and agrees with the headmaster, who has told Holden, "Life is a game one plays according to the rules."  Whenever I teach The Catcher in the Rye--which I have every year for a decade, though I rarely reread it all the way through like I did this year--I ask my students to evaluate this idea.  Most of them are in blithe agreement with Spencer: Holden really ought to have studied more and applied himself.  Why wouldn't they agree?  Studying and applying themselves is what got most of the students into the schools where I've taught in the first place.

But for me, and for Holden, this idea is horribly condescending, even fascistic.  In a note appended to his essay, Holden admits that he can't find it in himself to get interested in the ancient Egyptians.  Spencer might respond by offering some reasons why Holden might find the ancient Egyptians relevant or meaningful.  But instead he, like the headmaster before him, gestures toward a set of unspoken "rules" that Holden has violated.  The Egyptians aren't worth studying for their own sake, it's clear, but because Spencer has instructed Holden to study them.  They might as well have been Etruscans or Martians.  The point is not for Holden to learn about Egyptians but for Holden to learn how to conform to the expectations of polite society, for which the promised reward is bourgeois satisfaction.  Holden's absolutely right: life seems like a game if you're a "hotshot," but if you get on the "other side," this way of looking at life begins to seem like a horrible prison.

All that's to say, I have no sympathy for Holden's haters.  Every couple of months on Twitter someone starts a HOT LITERARY TAKE thread and the first six or seven replies are all by people who think Holden Caulfield is "whiny."  One tweet in that thread calls him "a school shooting waiting to happen."  (Mixed in are people who bravely think that Hemingway was a chauvinist and that adults should be allowed to read Young Adult novels.)  This position has always seemed, to me, to be a kind of conformity dressed up as iconoclasm, not least because everyone is saying the same thing.  Holden's hardly a perfect mouthpiece for these ideas--he is, above all else, a teenager, and shares with Huck Finn a kind of half-understanding of his own deep principles--but he correctly diagnoses that there is something rotten at the heart of the modern world, something high school graduates might label with words like "elitism" or "capitalism."  Part of the reluctance to credit Holden's discernment, I think, has to do with his whiteness, his wealth, his maleness.  ("But isn't he a hot-shot?" my students always ask.  "Yes," I say, "but does he pretend not to be?")  I think that fails to deal with his own clear ambivalence about money, for one--look at the way he insists on divesting himself of money to the nuns in the diner, or the guilt he feels when his roommate tries to pass Holden's suitcase off as his own.

But also, I'm just flabbergasted that those folks can't drum up sympathy for a teenager--white and wealthy and male as he may be--who is clearly on the precipice of a nervous breakdown.  Several times throughout the course of the novel, Holden feels as if he is going to disappear while he's crossing the street.  People he speaks with beg him to either lower his voice or speak up, but he's not even able to acknowledge that he's speaking strangely.  My students usually, and correctly, trace Holden's instability back to the death of his brother Allie, which has happened years before the narrative begins.  I had forgotten about this gut-wrenching memory of Allie's grave:

I certainly don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery.  Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all.  It wasn't too bad when the sun was out, but twice--twice--while we were there it started to rain.  It was awful.  It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach.  All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars.  That's what nearly drove me crazy.  All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner--everybody except Allie.

Allie's death really is at the root of Holden's instability, but also his wisdom.  What's the point, after all, of following the "rules of the game" and receiving your bourgeois satisfaction in return, if you're going to die, and if, what's worse, children die, too?  The "game" makes promises it can't keep; Allie didn't even get to play it.  Why should anyone give a fuck about the ancient Egyptians when leukemia is killing kids?  In Holden this manifests as a mordant preoccupation with children, an intense need to freeze childhood innocence and ward off the attendant forces of growing up.  As his former teacher, Mr. Antolini, tells him, such a response can only end in his own destruction.  As painful as it is, some kind of bargain has to be made with the phonies, because there is no meaningful life outside of social pressure.  That doesn't make him wrong.

In this whole post, I'm making a categorical error I try to get my students to avoid: I'm talking about Holden as if he's a real person, not a construct invented by Salinger.  It's a testament to Salinger's novel and its pitch-perfect voice that we all want to take Holden seriously as a person, whether we hate him or love him.  There's a long and fraught history of people taking Holden at face value and lionizing him--you know, like Mark David Chapman--but the opposite impulse is just as bad.  I don't think "You're not SUPPOSED to like him" is any more convincing or accurate than the takes about him being whiny.

I like Holden a lot.  It might be because I have been fortunate enough to know a lot of teenagers.  All of them deserve the right to observe, for the first time, that life is not inherently fair and that society as we have made it frequently unjust.  They deserve the right to figure out for themselves how to respond to those facts.  And they deserve more teachers like Mr. Antolini (even if Holden gets freaked out by his physical intimacy) and fewer teachers like Mr. Spencer.

J. D. Salinger Dies

“'Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.”

The literary world lost a great icon today. J. D. Salinger, author of Catcher in Rye and Nine Stories, died of natural causes today at the age of 91. You can read about him and his life here, or read our reviews of his work here.

R.I.P. Mr. Salinger.

Franny and Zooey / Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters / Seymour: An Introduction - J. D. Salinger Mega-Post

In spite of Chris's insistence that I read more Salinger than just Catcher in the Rye, I have to admit that the deciding factor in reading Salinger's oeuvre this year had more to do with time management than peer pressure. Now, having read everything Salinger wrote that's still in print--thought Nine Stories is due for a re-read--I wish I'd read it a lot sooner. Like, the day after I finished Catcher. The reason, as you know if you've read Salinger's lesser known novels, is that the four slim volumes and nine short stories that make up Salinger's bibliography are connected. Read together, they paint a panoramic picture of one unique family, the Glasses, and their various psychoses and musings.

The Glasses are made up of the parents, Les and Bessie, and their seven children, Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey, and Franny. The stories focus primarily on the children, especially Franny, Zooey, Buddy, and--though he rarely appears in-person--Seymour, whose monk-like demeanor and inexplicable suicide make him an ever-present figure in the minds of his siblings. In addition to being related, the Glass children also share another bond: all seven of them appeared as panelists on a quiz show called It's a Wise Child, where callers would quiz the abnormally bright children about whatever was on their mind.

Franny and Zooey, the first chronologically of the books I'm reviewing here, is split into two sections of unequal length. Section one, Zooey, follows Zooey Glass as she arrives home from school and meets up for lunch with her beau, Lane. Zooey continually subverts Lane's conversation--he wants to talk about a philosophy paper he wrote for class--to talk about a book she's reading called The Way of the Pilgrim. The Way of the Pilgrim (a real book, incidentally) centers around a monk traveling on foot over Russia, repeating the Jesus Prayer--Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner--and teaching it to others in an effort to get closer to God. The second half takes place at the Glass's house, were Zooey antagonizes his mother before going into the living room to antagonize Franny who, by the way, passed out in the bathroom at the end of her date for less-than-obvious reasons.

Franny and Zooey is tough to break down. There isn't much plot and there isn't an easily extractible message. Zooey thinks Franny's obsession with the Jesus Prayer is silly and possibly dangerous, and she, naturally, disagrees. The second book is composed primarily of two arguments, one between Franny and Zooey, and one between Zooey and his mother, and they both reveal essentially the same facet of Zooey. That is, he's selfish, sometimes cruel, insecure, and that, underneath that, he values his family, illustrated in both arguments, first subtly by a few conciliatory words toward his mother and secondly more overtly by calling Zooey pretending to be Buddy, who is second only to Seymour in the esteem of his siblings, and eviscerating himself in the guise of his brother.

Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenter is the second Glass story I read, and it's probably my favorite. Although it seems like a John Grisham novel plot-wise in comparison to Franny and Zooey, it's pretty spare as well. It follows Buddy, narrating in first-person, as he attends the event that would be Seymour's wedding if Seymour had shown up. As it happens, he doesn't and Buddy unwittingly ends up in the car with the bride's family, including her sister, who's livid, and a deaf-mute uncle, who's one of the best minor characters in all of Salinger. They drive around town, trying to figure out what to do, until Buddy finally, perhaps unwisely, suggests that they go to the apartment that he shares with Buddy while not away with the military. They arrive to find the apartment empty, and the day passes by until everyone is gone but the deaf-mute uncle, happy and thankful just to be out and about.

Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters is essential in the Glass chronology primarily because it sets up Seymour's honeymoon suicide in A Perfect Day for Bananafish, but it also seems to me that the old uncle is one of the most important symbols in the Glass series. He's portrayed throughout the story as existing on the fringes, clear on the general ideas of what's going on but fuzzy on the details. He's also constantly, relentlessly happy, always smiling and even extending a silent camaraderie to Buddy--notably, the only non-Glass shown to have a positive relationship to a Glass. Perhaps Salinger is drawing a contrast here, placing the uncle as a counterpoint to the Glasses, whose grasp on the details is impeccable but who can't seem to see the bigger picture. Franny, Zooey, and Buddy are all fixated on something: Franny on himself and his family, Buddy on Seymour, Zooey on the Jesus Prayer, but they all see things in microscopic vision, and are all, for the most part miserable.

Seymour seems to be the odd exception to this rule, which leads neatly into Seymour: An Introduction. Seymour: An Introduction probably has the least plot of any book I've ever read. In fact, saying it has a plot at all is a bit of a stretch. It's narrated by Buddy, but rather than following a linear timeline, Buddy moves from anecdote to philosophical theory to personal reminiscences, all in an ultimately vain attempt to understand the inscrutable Seymour. Seymour, who memorized Sappho, who never got mad, who loved everyone, who seemed like a Zen master to his siblings. Seymour, who killed himself in his hotel room on his honeymoon. Seymour is presented as a unified person, the one Glass where all the pieces fit, and yet, when it all comes down to it, he's as much a cipher as the narcissistic but caring Zooey or the kind but condescending Franny.

In Seymour: An Introduction, Buddy talks about the only non-Glass book Salinger ever published, Catcher in the Rye, claiming to have written it himself, so many critics have understandably picked Buddy as Salinger's avatar. I, on the other hand, tend toward Seymour the inscrutable. Salinger, the student of human nature who doesn't like people. One of the most famous authors alive who hasn't published anything since Vietnam ended. What could be more interesting, more tempting to spill ink on? Perhaps when Salinger finally dies, the works he's said to have color-coded and prepared for publication will be made available. Maybe we'll finally know why Seymour killed himself, why Salinger stopped publishing, and if the Jesus Prayer worked. But maybe we won't, and that's OK. Everyone should read Salinger anyway.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by JD Salinger

The first night, just this last week, that I felt quite hale and bullish enough to go back to work on this Introduction, I found that I'd lost not my afflatus but but my wherewithal to continue to write about Seymour. He'd grown too much while I was away. It was hardly credible. From the manageable giant he had been before I got sick, he had shot up, in nine short weeks, into the most familiar human being of my life, the one person who was always much, much too large to fit on ordinary typewriter paper--any typewriter paper of mine, anyway.

Leave it to Salinger to put these two works together--works that, like Franny and Zooey, form two halves of something much more cohesive--and leave the one called "Introduction" for last. There is a great irony to that title, not only because this is the last book-length piece Salinger published, but by the time the narrator of Seymour: An Introduction sits down and begins to write, Seymour has already been deceased for decades.

Both of these novellas are about Seymour from the perspective of his brother, Buddy, and both are marked by Seymour's absence. In Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Buddy recalls taking leave from the army to attend Seymour's wedding in New York, but Seymour never arrives and somehow Buddy gets trapped in a car with the Matron of Honor and other members of the bride's wedding party, most of whom have a very poor opinion of the absent Seymour. Seymour: An Introduction is a more comprehensive treatise on Seymour, covering only the early parts of his life and written well after Seymour's suicide.

In a manner of speaking, Seymour's presence and absence define much of Salinger's works about the Glass family: He appears in two works, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which recounts his suicide, and "Hapworth 16, 1924," a late Salinger novella written from a young Seymour's perspective. And yet, he is the subject of these two novellas, and casts a long shadow in death over the events of Franny and Zooey; in Introduction, it is suggested that Buddy is the author of Catcher in the Rye, which casts the relationship between Holden Caulfield and his dead brother Allie in a new light.

These two novellas make it clear that Buddy is somewhat in awe of his brother. Though all the Glass siblings are invariably intelligent--one recurring references in the books is to a radio roundtable show, "It's a Wise Child," in which they all took part as children--Seymour occupies a singular place. Buddy describes him as a poet, sometimes literally, but often simply possessing of a poet's soul, deeply wise in the manner of Zen Buddhists. The title of the first novella comes from a line in Sappho, which Buddy's sister Boo Boo leaves in a note for Seymour on his wedding day:

Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man.

Taller than a tall man--this describes Seymour perfectly, not just on his wedding day, but as the figure which towers over all of the other Glass siblings as the pinnacle of wisdom, kindness, and self-sacrifice. In Introduction Buddy is continuously apologizing for his efforts, as a writer, to place himself in the same spotlight, as his brother, but there are conflicting desires here: One, to step out of the way and let the world see Seymour for the genius that Buddy believes he is, and two, to be recognized in the same way. Buddy reprints a letter Seymour wrote to him in which Seymour affirms their connectedness:

The membrane is so thin between us. Is it so important for us to keep in mind which is whose? That time two summers ago when I was out so long, I was able to trace that you and Z[ooey] and I have been brothers for no fewer than four incarnations, maybe more. Is there no beauty in that? For us, doesn't each of our individualities begin right at the point where we own up to our extremely close connections and accept the inevitability of borrowing one another's jokes, talents, idiocies? You notice I don't include neckties. I think Buddy's neckties are Buddy's neckties, but they are a pleasure to borrow without permission.

There is a valid temptation here, I think, to see Seymour and Buddy as facets of Salinger himself--on one side, the transcendent philosopher, and on the other, the very human writer. Perhaps there is a Buddhist-like attempt here to separate the lofty from the ordinary, and throw the ordinary away, but the very nature of these novellas affirms that the two are inextricably connected. The question that remains is why Seymour, whom Salinger paints as brimming over with joy, wisdom, and kindness, chose to commit suicide. I often think that the answer to that question, if we could find it, might provide some sort of answer to the question of why Salinger has silenced himself for the past fifty years.

In any case, I think that Seymour: An Introduction might be the best thing that Salinger ever put out. It's written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness fashion, not like Joyce, but as close to stream-of-consciousness as a writer as mannered and minimalist as Salinger could achieve. I recommend it highly.

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?

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

Not too long ago Carlton posted a great review of Franny and Zooey here.

The two main characters in this book are both self indulgent and heartbreaking. Franny is on a spiritual quest that would be more appropriate for a man ready to leave his family, take up religious fasting, and sit under a tree awaiting enlightenment than for a college student from a troubled family of freaks out of New York who has become disillusioned with the people handling her education. Zooey is on a quest to set his younger sister straight but he likes the sound of his own voice too much to do any good. The only person Franny wants to talk to about anything is her brother Seymour that has committed suicide years before our story takes place. The narrator of this little book is Buddy, their other brother who lives between the academic world and his secluded telephone-free house in the woods. Everyone seems to think Franny's situation would smooth over if she could talk to Buddy but there's no way for the family to get into contact with him. We meet him, however, through a lengthy letter that he had written Zooey years before lecturing him about this and that...

It seems that all the Glass children are preachy after their years of being child stars on the radio show It's A Wild Child, where they gave advice and insight to the people called in. For instance, Buddy told the listeners once that , "a man should be able to lie at the bottom of a hill with his throat cut, slowly bleeding to death, and if a pretty girl or an old woman should pass by with a beautiful jug balanced perfectly on the top of her head, he should be able to raise himself up on one arm and see the jug safely over the hill." These people and their conversations are absolutely impossible. I like reading them, but if I had to sit in a room and actually listen to one I think I would become frustrated with all of the Glass family pretty quickly. I prefer Holden's gang.

As Carlton pointed out, there isn't a lot that actually happens: a conversation in a restaurant, a girl faints, a man takes a bath and reads a letter, a man bickers with his mother, he shaves, he talks to his sister who is breaking down on their family's couch, and the brother calls the sister from a private line in the house and pretends to be another one of her brothers. That's it. During the course of reading it, though, I came up with all kinds of other ideas: Franny was pregnant, Franny had a sordid affair with the professor she's raging about, ect. I think those would have been far too easy explanations so I ditched them.

After the book was over I was relieved. Not that I was at the end of it, but that it closed the way that it did, with the fat lady.

Nine Stories by JD Salinger

I love love love these stories. I expected to like them--after all, Catcher in the Rye is one of the world's best books--but I don't think I expected them to be as memorable as they are. Though, I suppose, if you produce as little as Salinger, you really ought to make the best of what you publish, right?

What impresses me about Salinger is that, while these prose in these stories isn't necessarily my favorite--especially because Salinger is keen on using judgement words like "memorable" and "unprettiness," which sort of ruin for me the experience of discovering things about characters and situations organically--but the dialogue and the realness of characters' interaction is so true and well-wrought that each story becomes very convincing. Too many authors deprive their characters of personality by making their characters say things that could be uttered by the average man, but the dialogue of Salinger's characters shapes and defines them because it's so fresh and not dumbed down. Here's an exchange between Seymour Glass and a small girl in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish":

Sibyl released her foot. "Did you read 'Little Black Sambo'?" she asked.

"It's very funny that you should ask me that," he said. "It so happens I just finished reading it last night." He reached down and took back Sybil's hand. "What did you think of it?" he asked her.

"Did the tigers run all around that tree?"

"I thought they'd never stop. I never saw so many tigers."

"There were only six," Sybil said.

"Only six!" said the young man. "Do you call that only?"

"Do you like wax?" Sybil asked.

"Do I like what?" asked the young man.

"Wax."

"Very much. Do you?"

Sybil nodded. "Do you like olives?" she asked.

"Olives--yes. Olives and wax. I never go anyplace without 'em."

To me, this sounds like many conversations I've had with small children. There's an element of absurdity to it that you think would be easy to capture, but I suspect if you or I tried it we wouldn't come nearly as close as Salinger at making it sound natural.

I did have one reservation, which was that Salinger seems fixated on two types of characters: the precocious child and the witty, cynical 20-30something. After finishing the collection, however, I decided that this was not necessarily the limits of Salinger's abilities, but that these stories really do work with a few central themes in common, whereas I had been expecting sort of a hodgepodge, unconnected collection. I think somewhere in these nine stories Salinger is suggesting that precociousness in a child--like Sibyl, or Esme in "For Esme--with Love and Squalor," or the Comanches in "The Laughing Man"--becomes in young adulthood a sort of unsatisfied and restless cleverness that manifests itself in depression and ennui. Most particularly it can be seen in the first-person narratives of "For Esme--with Love and Squalor," in which the narrator is a disillusioned soldier who is always cracking jokes, and "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," about a young art student who pretends to be an accomplished Parisian artist in order to work at a correspondence art school with an older Japanese couple. Of course, in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," these qualities combined with what seems to be Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder form a recipe for suicide. The narrator of "Blue Period" (De Daumier-Smith is his psuedonym; his real one is never given, though surely he overlaps somewhat with Salinger himself) uses his mendacity as a guard against his own disillusionment and cynicism, and he struggles through his corrections to his students' work--which is mediocre at best--until he stumbles across the paintings of a nun which are, to him, an unexpected and fleeting moment of sheer beauty. It is almost as if Salinger's young characters, marked by their cleverness but never their happiness, are constantly seeking the sense of wonder that they grew out of in childhood.

This idea comes across particularly strong in my favorite story of the nine, "The Laughing Man," about a boyscout leader who is constantly telling his troop a serialized story about the title character, an absurd amalgmation of crime noir, Bond novels, and comic books who "subsists on eagles' blood and rice." It is told through the eyes of one of the scouts, who doesn't understand completely what is at hand when the scoutmaster's girlfriend keeps showing up and then, suddenly, doesn't--but when the scoutmaster pulls over the troop bus and tells the final chapter of "The Laughing Man," brutally killing off the boys' beloved hero, we know what has happened: his heart has been broken.

The last story, "Teddy," brings the theme of precociousness to a strange extreme. The titular character is a young boy aboard a ship returning to America from Britain where, we learn very gradually (Salinger is a master of delayed exposition), he has been undergoing psychological "tests." As he bickers with his parents and scribbles in his diary, he seems just another gifted little boy until he reveals something to a passenger coincidentally familiar with the boy's "tests"--in former lives he has sought to obtain Nirvana but a spiritual stumble has caused him to be reincarnated once again as Teddy, to try one more time. He has an acute awareness of his spiritual life and could tell you, if you wished, the exact date and circumstances of your death. This is strange territory for Salinger, but the story's power and effectiveness is undeniable.

Of course, these themes surface again in Catcher in the Rye, and I feel that having read them gives me a fresher understanding of that book, especially the relationship between Holden and his precocious little sister, Phoebe. How much more potent is Holden's preoccupation with the vulgarities scratched on the walls of Phoebe's school when the possibility that Phoebe will grow into someone like Holden emerges? Something to think about.

Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite books. So I figured I should probably try out some other works by Salinger. This book is split into two unequal parts. The first, entitled 'Franny' takes place mainly in a restaurant. Franny, whose name we find out later is Francis Glass, has come to visit her boyfriend, Lane, at the college he attends. Franny and Lane bicker over things of a trivial nature throughout dinner. He is somewhat pompous. She is somewhat annoyed at his pomposity. Franny seems to be slightly ill -- not touching her food, looking unusually pale, etc. She begins to describe this book that she is reading. It is about a man that is on a spiritual journey, which essentially entails repeating over and over some variation of, "Jesus, have mercy on me." Franny appears to be rather enamored with this man and his religious quest. The section ends with her fainting dead away in the restaurant and coming to on a couch, staring at the ceiling.

In the much-longer section, 'Zooey', we find out that Franny is the youngest member of the Glass children. The second youngest: Zachary, commonly referred to as Zooey. We find out more about Franny in this section than in the first. Her age. Her feeling about school. Her family life. Both Franny and Zooey feel that their eldest brothers had a detrimental effect on them. They were funnel fed all sort of esoteric knowledge as young kids, leading to their regularly appearing on the radio show, It's a Wise Child. This section take place in the span of a couple of hours at the Glass house. Zooey, a fairly accomplished 25-year-old actor living at home, is getting ready to meet someone for lunch. Franny is lying on the couch, apparently have some sort of spiritual nervous breakdown.

Franny and Zooey has very little plot, but rather driven by its true-to-life dialogue. Salinger's writing is clear, insightful, and organic. I really liked the sentence, "Zooey suddenly, sharply, turned around, without taking his foot off the window seat, and picked up, snatched up, a match folder that was on his mother's writing table."

There is a section where Zooey is talking about possibly going to France for a movie. "But I'd hate like hell to leave New York. If you must know, I hate any kind of so-called creative type who gets on any kind of ship. I don't give a goddam what his reasons are. I was born here. I went to school here. I've been run over here--twice, and on the same damn street. I have no business acting in Europe, for God's sake."

While I like what I have read of Salinger so far, I find it intriguing that he was so good at tapping into 20-something angst. After all he was in his forties when he wrote these stories.

I have been thinking about the ending of this book for quite a while now, and I don't think I am any closer to really grasping it. I have, however, come to the conclusion that my liking the book is not predicated on my fully understanding the ending.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Part II of "Books that everyone else read in school but me": J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

I kind of resisted reading this book, in part because of the hallowed status it has among high school- and college-aged persons. This and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five probably compromise 90% of the subjects of college admisson essays that begin, "Describe a book you love and the effect it's had on your life." So many people my age seem to identify so strongly with Holden Caulfield that I just didn't want to be one of them.

Problem is, Caulfield is exactly like me. He's smart, well-read, articulate, vain, idealistic, obsessive, disillusioned, and deeply, deeply flawed. I am tempted to say that he is the most human character I've ever read about in my life. He says things impulsively and then says the opposite later; he loves and hates things and people simultaneously. It sounds maddening but it's human, and it would be impossible for anyone in high school or college not to identify with him.

The story follows Caulfield during the few days between when he's kicked out of his prep school for academic reasons and the day he has to return home for what his mother thinks is the beginning of winter break; in the meantime he hangs out in New York and sort of just exists, alone and fighting the power of phoniness in the world. He's severely depressed and expresses hatred for almost everything, but inevitably shows many of the same characteristics that he so dislikes. It is not an easy book to figure out; it's neither possible nor necessary to determine whether Caulfield's outlook on the human race is correct or incorrect. Somehow, I believe, it is both at the same time.

I could go on and on about what happens in this book, but the plot isn't really as important as the character, and to really appreciate that it has to be read. So read it.

On a side note: The "frank" depictions of sex in this book make it one of the more challenged high school readings in America. Challenges to it are clearly bunk, but the book's openness about sexuality interests me because it's set in the late forties and if you took out all the temporal markers like the names of actors, it could be a milder version of I Am Charlotte Simmons. It's a great depiction of "hook-up culture" in school, which is great because you don't always think of things being the same so long ago, but they were. Holden's accounts of sexuality and alcohol could be lifted from my roommate's diary, if he kept one and it weren't in Dutch.