Subject: Re: Janet Malcolm article: NY Review of Books, June 21, 2001 issue
From: Suzanne Morine (suzannem@dimensional.com)
Date: Tue Jun 12 2001 - 21:48:54 GMT
At 01:43 PM 6/12/2001 -0700, Cecilia Baader wrote:
>Janet Malcolm's article covers a number of points that I'd like to
>address, but I fear that I shall only have the facility to cover one or
>two today. Actually, probably not even one. A half of a point, perhaps.
In that spirit, I have a bit of a disagreement with Janet Malcolm's article.
She wrote that all of Salinger's books, including Catcher, are about people
in a sort of hermetically sealed world apart that we do not fully
recognize. The worlds feel dark and terrifying yet familiar but are not.
"Salinger creates the storms that whirl around his characters' heads in the
close, hermetically sealed world in which they live."
I may be misunderstanding her. I disagree about Catcher. Holden would love
to retreat into a hermetically sealed world -- literally the glass cases in
the Museum of Natural History, and by extension all of childhood -- but he
can't. He is not in such a world.
The world as we know it repeatedly attacks Holden, his values, his plans.
He gets beaten up twice! He escapes to New York and little goes right. He
can't get tickets for anything but a benefit matinee that he has no
interest in. He successfully gets a rare record as hoped but breaks it in
his drunkenness. He can't even kiss Sally for long due to a maniac cab
driver. He dreams of hitch hiking out west and living on nothing, but knows
he can't do that, really. In the end, he ends up sick in a rest home for
months.
"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and
peaceful, because there isn't any." (p. 204, regular paper back edition)
Suzanne
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