Re: House of Glass

On Sun, Aug 18, 2002 at 07:27:01PM -0400, Aaron Sommers wrote:

Hi, Aaron, and welcome to the participation angle!

I waited a bit to see if anyone else would step in and comment on
this. Nobody has, so I will offer my responses, for what they are
worth. (Not very much, I'm afraid.)

> My name on this list was going to be Douglas Bunting but somehow i still
> have yet to figure this software correctly so here goes...

I'm not sure I get this reference or what you mean here, so I'm just
going to skip it and note that I simply didn't get what you were
hinting at....

> The rumor mill had a "WWII" novel that Salinger had finished, and was
> apparently tucked away.

There has been plenty of speculation over time about what is in
Salinger's vault, with its pretty color-coding and such. But that's
all it is -- idle speculation. I don't think there's anyone outside
of his inner circle (whatever that consists of) who can say what that
involves.

> Does anyone else think this novel has alot to do
> with Seymour and Buddy's years in the service. Here, we know S was in the
> Signal Corps, and Buddy, well all we can pull is similarities from X (yes I
> know he wasn't Buddy). But if S saw a doctor during his duty, as we
> tentatively know from PDFB, than surely there was an 'episode' during the
> war. There's also the excerpts from his journal in RHTRBC.

I see where you're heading, but I admit that I'm always a little leery
of drawing conclusions about a writer's work based on the writer's
actual experiences. Salinger apparently saw plenty of horror during
his tour of duty in WWII, and presumably has a lot to choose from. I
don't know if he would frame the fiction in terms of his own
experiences in Counter-Intelligence, or would fictionalize it more.
Who knows, really? I'd like to think he would try to get away from
the trap of writing things down as they happened to him, in favor of
something more abstract than his personal experiences and views.

That is simply my own preference for story-telling that gets away from
literalness.

> I hope this novel
> is about the war, there is alot I would like to read about concerning
> Muriel, S, the Glass family (esp. Walt and Buddy) and how the "house of
> Glass" fell. Does anyone else have ideas or comments in regards to this
> story?

I really don't know what one can say that would be more than mere
speculation. Perhaps this is why nobody on the list picked up this
hot potato. 8-)

I think that catchy expressions like the "house of Glass" sound
appealing but are hard to flesh out with any kind of substantive
content. It's impossible, I think, for us on the outside to guess
with any accuracy at what Salinger means to accomplish in what he
called the "casino proper" of his fiction.

Just my two pence.

Welcome again to the world of posting! I hope this response won't
discourage you from posting some more....

--tim

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Received on Wed Aug 21 13:42:02 2002