Subject: JDS in the NY Review of Books
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Sat Jun 02 2001 - 03:15:11 GMT
There's a strangely fascinating piece in the current New York Review
of Books by Janet Malcolm (June 21, 2001, p. 16), apropos of nothing
in particular except Malcolm's welcome rediscovery of Salinger's
place in American letters.
(It also has an uncommon photograph of him that I've seen SOMEWHERE,
looking ruggedly good-looking, like a mid-twentieth-century Jack
London, in a casual jacket and holding a cigarette, with no
photographer's credit supplied.)
It's called "Justice to J.D. Salinger," and explores the Glass family
as a vital part of modern American literature. She does a pretty
thorough job of dissecting how the Glasses interact with each other
and with their world, how they are alone in their world, how they
rely so heavily on each other, and how blunderingly wrong the
contemporary critics were in assessing the various Glass stories as
those stories found their way into print.
Malcolm dismisses the charges of the time that "Zooey" "seem[ed] too
long," and declares that it "is arguably Salinger's masterpiece."
She also makes what I believe is nicely and oddly true, that neither
"Franny" nor "Zooey" has become dated. (This is what leads her into
tearing up the critics: "[Zooey] remains brilliant and is in no
essential sense dated. It is the contemporary criticism that has
dated. Like the contemporary criticism of OLYMPIA, for example,
which jeered at Manet for his crude indecency, or that of WAR AND
PEACE, which condescended to Tolstoy for the inept 'shapelessness' of
the novel, [the criticism] now seems magnificently misguided.")
She closely reads both "Franny" and "Zooey" and gives a contemporary
whirl to "Bananafish," where she dissects the telephone conversation
between Muriel and her mother, "which mordantly renders the bourgeois
world of received ideas and relentless department-store shopping in
which the women are comfortably and obliviously ensconced." Seymour
is depicted not as a saint, but as "the Myshkin-like figure whose
death inhabits the Glass family stories." Interestingly, she observes
that "as he appears in 'Bananafish,' he isn't quite right for the role.
He is too witty and too crazy. (When he leaves the beach and goes back
to the hotel to kill himself, his behavior in the elevator is that of a
bellicose maniac.)"
Malcolm returns several times to Buddy's attribution to himself of
authorship of the Glass stories, and smartly observes that we accept
the portrait-within-a-portrait "after fifty years of postmodern
experimentation (and five Zuckerman books by Philip Roth)." She also
observes that Salinger "would permanently retain the dualism of
'Bananafish,' the view of the world as a battleground between the
normal and the abnormal, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the
talentless and the gifted, the well and the sick."
Malcolm nicely ties Seymour, Franny, and Zooey to Kafka, and the
themes of food and hunger; she brings in "some of the atmosphere of
the Greek myths about return from the underworld and the Bible
stories in which dead children are resurrected."
She performs a striking and insightful analysis of Bessie and Zooey's
bathroom scene (and takes a side tour of the use of cigarettes and
cigars as a plot device in Salinger, something that has emerged on
this list several times), and shows repeatedly Salinger's magical
touch for animating inanimate objects. Yet she demonstrates that the
world in which the Salinger characters live -- all of them, including
Holden -- is a false and hermetic world, not unlike a snowstorm scene
in a glass paperweight.
Malcolm's one minor factual misstep is that she can't seem to get Mr.
Antolini's name right -- he comes out as "Antoli" a couple of times --
but she has a firm grasp of the characters and their circumstances,
and she never fails to put them in clear and sensible context. (At
one point -- striking perhaps for its obviousness, though it is an
easily overlooked fact -- she observes that Boo Boo is the only one
of the lot who can be said to have a truly normal life, of all the
Glass and Caulfield siblings.) And she feels that in the Glass
corpus, Salinger's one true slip is the use of the Fat Lady, whom
Malcolm believes to be "a tumble into condescension." "I would have
preferred," says Malcolm, "that Salinger had stopped at the chicken
soup and the artist's minding of his own business."
Finally, and brilliantly, Malcolm discusses a letter that was
published by Matt Salinger in The New York Observer when Margaret
Salinger's DREAM CATCHER was published last year. She quotes from the
letter at length, and, sure enough, there's a vocal similarity between
father and son, and she says that what is "almost eerie about the
letter is the sound that comes out of it -- the singular and instantly
recognizable sound of Salinger, which we haven't heard for nearly
forty years (and to which the daughter's heavy drone could not be more
unrelated)."
It's not clear why Malcolm chose this moment for her essay, unless
she, like so many of us, has on her mind the fact of its presently
being the astounding *fiftieth* anniversary of the publication of
the novel, CATCHER. If you can get your hands on a copy of the June
21 New York Review of Books, do give this essay a look. It's a
refreshing take on several subjects we have talked to death here,
and it brings to light a few fresh insights and more than a few good
turns of phrase. (Too bad we can't get Janet Malcolm to join us
from time to time!)
Best regards to all, with astonishment at our hitting the fiftieth
anniversary of the appearance of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. It is a
delight to witness how fresh the story is, even after so many years
and peripheral events have passed.
--tim o'connor
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