Subject: Re: JDS in the NY Review of Books
From: Lambodara (ganesha@rochester.rr.com)
Date: Sun Jun 03 2001 - 05:39:36 GMT
Amazingly absent from this breathtakingly clear view of franny and zooey is
even passing mention of the book as a re-reading of the bhagavad gita.
Franny and Zooey (it has often been observed) follows both the plot line and
intention of this classic of the Hindu canon. I find it to be the most
readable and intelligible retelling of Krsna's revelation to Arjuna on the
field of war.
Stephen J Brown
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim O'Connor" <tim@roughdraft.org>
To: <bananafish@roughdraft.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2001 3:15 AM
Subject: JDS in the NY Review of Books
>
> 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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