Of course, that headline has appeared in about three places already. I’m on my way out and have no tie to look out the books for a phrase right now.
At last the thing has happened. The thing that might, in about a hundred years, lead to the opening of those famous vaults in which are stored all the decades’-worth of unpublished subsequent writings by the author of all those iconic – yes, iconic – books. When I first discovered JD Salinger at the age of 19 he hit me like a wave breaking. I was drenched in it. Catcher in the Rye was good, but what really blew me away – sad as it may seem to say so now – was the Glass family. Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters was a really profound experience for me. Franny & Zooey was one of my favourite books nearly to the end of my 20s. I do think these books represent something really good about the fifties, something we can never recapture – why, even the idea that “the last man in the city with a completely unguarded face,” or however he put it, would be a good thing.
The Burlington Free Press says this:
Enraged by all the “phonies” who make “me so depressed I go crazy,” Holden soon became American literature’s most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel’s sales are astonishing – more than 60 million copies worldwide – and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams – to never grow up.
But I think we are all, while strangely infantilised in some ways, still so busy being “grown up|” in all the others – so cynical and worldly and materialistic – that his books seem strangely out of step now. I know everyone will want to see them and read what he’s been writing all these years – but if it hadn’t been for them being hidden, wouldn’t we be thinking they were somehow too naif for our jaded era?
More – and more cogent, I’m sure – later. Anyway, RIP Salinger. I’m going to the theatre now, a very serious contemporary German drama, links etc afterwards. I almost have a feeling they should announce Salinger’s death from the stage.
EDITING IN: Well I meant to go away and do something clever, like reread a book and find apt quotations from it, or devise some clever theory about the Zeitgeist and how old JDS is going to fit into it as we claw our way back out of this recession… but no. I managed precisely nothing. But never fear, because the wonderful James Marcus has gone and come up with the goods! Read his take on it here. You’ll be both glad and also kind of sorry you did.)
I think the Glass stories are one of the wonders of 20th century literature. But that’s just me. Sad. I hope he had a nice life away from the spotlight.
Dear Katy
I too read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ in my teens and was hugely disappointed by it. I had been spoiled by reading too much Updike and Bellow who were far better writers. I didn’t bother with Salinger after that. However, he sold over 60 million copies and was able to retire on the royalties at a relatively young age so he must have been doing something right. Sometimes a writer (another example is Dan Brown ) can capture the zeitgeist without being particularly good.
Best wishes from Simon
I first read Catcher in the Rye at the age of 15, when it was pretty much my introduction to ‘grown-up’ fiction. And have read it maybe six times since- including that quite exciting occasion in, I think, 1994, when an edition was released restoring the author’s text, which had been ever-so-slightly amended by the original editors (Salinger had basically used to many italics for their liking). I knew he had become a recluse, of course, but I didn’t know he was supposed to have amassed volumes of unseen work in the intervening decades. Imagine the weight of responsibility on the first reviewers to pick up that legacy…. millions of devotees longing to find out whether the hidden works bear comparison to their feted predecessor. I envy them but at the same time don’t envy them at all.