"Mr. Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015..."

One collection, to be called “The Family Glass,” would add five new stories to an assembly of previously published stories about the fictional Glass family, which figured in Mr. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” and elsewhere, according to the claims, which surfaced in interviews and previews of the documentary and book last week.

Another would include a retooled version of a publicly known but unpublished tale, “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans,” which is to be collected with new stories and existing work about the fictional Caulfields, including “Catcher in the Rye.”

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.

Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger

I assigned Nine Stories as the summer reading for my upcoming AP English course. Students respond well to Catcher in the Rye, I reasoned, and might respond well to Salinger's other work, and a set of short stories, as easily portioned as it is, might take some of the burden of summer reading away. Whether or not those things are true--well, I'll tell you that in a few days when I find out how many of them completed the assignment.

Nine Stories remains as I remembered it: a collection of plain-spoken, yet acutely detailed, accounts of human interactions. I am still mostly baffled at "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" (What is it about Ginnie's interaction with Selena's brother that makes her go back on her demand to be paid for the cab fare?), mostly bored by "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," and heartbroken by "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" and "The Laughing Man," which probably are the best offerings here.

I was less absorbed in "Teddy" than I was the first time around--when you know for sure what's coming, that Teddy accurately predicts his own death, his long, plodding conversation about the nature of reincarnation saps the story of its dramatic thrust. The most rewarding to re-read--that is, the one that seemed richer for offering things I had missed the first time around--was "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," about a young artist who fakes his way into teaching at an art correspondence school.

The narrator--a nineteen-boy who is decidedly not the Parisienne De Daumier-Smith, friend of Picasso--takes the job out of boredom, or listlessness, or maybe is simply trying to get away from the stepfather he has to bum around with now that his mother has died. His students are irredeemably bad--not necessarily without talent, but puerile, or pornographic, or both. But one, a Catholic nun in Toronto, piques his interest, and he writes her a very personal letter asking her if he could mentor her as a painter.

What the narrator finds, perhaps without looking, is a kind of religious epiphany. Sister Irma's painting is a scene of Christ's crucifixion, and he experiences it as a secular vision. There is something unmistakably modern in his awe; it is the reaction of a world for whom artistic revelation has usurped religious revelation, who cherishes the symbol because it is more palpable than the murky truth to which it refers. It is easy to point out the tone-deafness of his letter to Irma--he asks, credulously, if being a nun is "satisfactory, in a spiritual way," and privately imagines that she is a young girl he might rescue from her vows--but it is also achingly sincere. This quasi-spirituality is so powerful that it gives Salinger a chance to try out some rare poetic flourishes:

Just before I feel asleep, the moaning sound came again through the wall from the Yoshotos' bedroom. I pictured both Yoshotos coming to me in the morning and asking me, begging me, to hear their secret problem out, to the last, terrible detail. I saw exactly how it would be. I would sit down between them at the kitchen table and listen to each of them. I would listen, listen, listen, and with my head in my hands--till finally, unable to stand it any longer, I would reach down into Mme. Yoshoto's throat, take up her heart in my hand and warm it as I would a bird. Then, when all was put right, I would show Sister Irma's work to the Yoshotos, and they would share my joy.

But it is Sister Irma's parish priest that writes back, withdrawing her from the school. The worldly nature of the narrator's epiphany has not enabled him to make a real connection or a real communication, as is often the case with more religious epiphanies. An agnostic, he fashions the nun into a goddess-figure, who then acts, like a goddess, inscrutably.

But the moment that elevates the story happens at the end, and is something I do not think I totally understood when I read it a couple years ago. The narrator, having dressed up in a tuxedo for dinner and then having changed his mind, watches a girl undress a mannequin in a store window:

She was changing the truss on the wooden dummy. As I came up to the show window, she had evidently just taken off the old truss; it was under her left arm (her right "profile" was toward me), and she was lacing up the new one on the dummy. I stood watching her, fascinated, till suddenly she sensed, then saw that she was being watched. I quickly smiled--to show her that this was a non-hostile figure in the tuxedo in the twilight on the other side of the glass--but it did no good. The girl's confusion was out of all normal proportion. She blushed, she dropped the removed truss, she stepped back on a stack of irrigation basins--and her feet went from under her.

The narrator calls this his "Experience," and has to steady himself against the glass. Clearly, this epiphanic moment has usurped the last one--but why? I think it is because he senses the girl's great bafflement at seeing him, tuxdedoed, outside her shop window, and that in some way she is experiencing an epiphany of her own, an inscrutable spiritual vision. For him, it is not the experience of the vision, but the embodiment of it, that truly satisfies, being the god-figure instead of the saint.

He writes in his diary, "I am giving Sister Irma her freedom to follow her own destiny. Everyone is a nun." This is not quite right; one must be a god to grant freedom to a nun, and though everyone is in some respect a nun, I think Salinger is suggesting that everyone is a little bit more than that. Or, rather, that nuns and the god for whom the toil are not entities as separate as one might have thought.

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.