joyce maynard review again
WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Fri, 13 Nov 1998 09:19:34 -0700 (MST)
Ok, as requested, here's the review first published in Gazette (Colorado
Springs) a few months ago. I think I have a better take on Maynard and
her book in an essay I've been working on, but my writing proecess of late
has been mostly about reading student work and working on institutional
probs at my school and applying to jobs elsewhwere...I have a weekend of
writing that includes reviewing _Books of the Century: A Hundred Years of
Authors, Ideas, and Literature_, preparing a manuscript of poems to
submit in a contest, revising an essay on writing, and getting to a new
poem that has been hiding out in my bones somewhwere in some marrow that
just right now seems too obscure to know exactly where to break open and
suck into words...
I'm pretty scathing here and yet have to admit that I thought about toning
it down and didn't because it's what I believe. I still respect Ms.
Maynard's writing accomplishments as superior to mine in many ways and I
know she believes her book and approach to readers (as evidenced on her
web page bulletin board) is very different from what I perceived...here it
is, without further preamble except to admit that I should be fired up to
write and yet feel more like mr. salinger might have when he wrote the
dust jacket of F&Z, saying "...I suppose, that sooner or later I'll bog
down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and
mannerisms."
I'm not sure this is going to make sense but I'm burying it in a long post
so only the determined readers may understand that I'm posting this review
with new research tucked into my mind that is much more of a thorn in mr.
salinger's side than joyce maynard...I'm starting to wonder very seriously
if the master was at the end of his writing road with hapworth...I like to
have the hope of a safe filled with Glass manuscripts, but what if they
actually decrease the fictive power of existing Glass stories and
reputation of the author? I admit I'm shaking like the child narrator in
"Laughing Man" at the end of this post and know that if I'm silent and
meditate today, the silence may have words I need...
here it is now, I promise no more salinger rambling preambling,just a
review wrapped poorly in my own shoddy writing karma and these pixels
simply offered to m.e. and others with my doubts and own need to write
somewhere in the white space that makes all writing what it is...will
approximately 831 words
What She Never Learned
by Will Hochman
Review of At Home in the World
by Joyce Maynard
Picador USA
$25.00 (ISBN:0-312-19556-7)
Joyce Maynard says her new book is about her. At 44, she feels she has a
life worthy of a memoir. She has the writing skills to do it--her prose is
sharp and her eye is keen. The problem is that she is so focused on
herself it's a book only her family may enjoy. Though one could also
logically wonder if her children may be a bit embarrassed about family
revelations of teenage sex and alcoholism. Ms. Maynard breaks her code of
silence about her Lolita-like affair with J.D. Salinger, she writes openly
her "night father's" ugly drinking, and she describes an over-attentive
mother in such detail that it might even challenge the attention spans of
the most dedicated psychiatrists. At Home in the World fails to be at home
in readers' worlds because Ms. Maynard never really manages to make her
breakthroughs meaningful to anyone except herself.
For Salinger fans, there's plenty of gossip about his affair with the Ms.
Maynard when she was 18 and the author of The Catcher in the Rye was 53.
Clearly, she is bitter about his taking advantage of the young girl she
was, though she is also clear about how she and her mother contrived to
attract Salinger at the time. Ms. Maynard now justifies her memoir and
inclusion of Salinger as being the result of her own daughter turning 18
and helping Ms. Maynard to see that her rights have been abused all these
years. And she does have a right to tell her story. Unfortunately, all
this really amounts to is dull revenge.
Ms. Maynard acknowledges how much she loved and learned from J.D.
Salinger, and even ends the book with a dramatic scene in which she once
again invades his privacy to learn of her purpose in his life. But
Salinger wants nothing to do with her, claiming he doesn't really know
her. Ms. Maynard even quotes Salinger in this scene. He's criticizing her
in the most vitriolic terms when he says, "You have spent your career
writing gossip. You write empty, meaningless, offensive, putrid, gossip.
You live your life as a pathetic, parasitic, gossip." Ms. Maynard
incredibly ignores any consciousness of the point that she may be a bit
one-sided or biased in her description of a lover and even absurdly claims
accuracy as she brings her more than twenty year old memories to life.
It would be easy to see Mr. Salinger's response to Ms. Maynard as that of
a threatened animal about to be caged. But if you bother to read the book,
you will probably find yourself agreeing with Mr. Salinger and may even
need the quintessential Salinger word--phony--to realize how silly At Home
in the World is. Ms. Maynard's book never connects her father problem to
her affair with Salinger, and most of the details and notions of her life
are not shaped in ways that can mean anything to readers who are not in
love with Ms. Maynard as much as she is in love with herself.
In At Home in the World, Ms. Maynard pretends to be a courageous feminist-
"the truth woman" overcoming "the great writer"--but in reality she is
selling self-centered drivel and gossip about a writer who legitimately
prefers to withdraw from such concerns. Ms. Maynard and her publisher have
a wonderful hype machine in gear--you can even get a sense of Ms. Maynard
(or an autographed copy of her book) from her web page. Though Ms. Maynard
claims the book is about her, when she read from her At Home in the World
in Denver's Tattered Cover, she read only the passages that concerned her
relationship with Mr. Salinger and then complained bitterly when people
asked about the better known author. Oddly, she reacted to audience
interest in Mr. Salinger as though he was trying to steal her spotlight.
It was easy to see had not achieved what she intended and was now blaming
Mr. Salinger for her present writing problems, though her attempt at
selling her Salinger episodes has probably been profitable.
It's ironic that Ms. Maynard claims to have learned to write from Mr.
Salinger and claims every word in At Home in the World is true. Maybe,
maybe not...but this reviewer's truth is that the book, though well
written, is boring and hypocritical. If readers want to learn what Ms.
Maynard knows about Salinger, they can get all the juicy details in her
September Vanity Fair excerpt, and if they want to know details about Ms.
Maynard, her web page will suffice. Sadly, what Ms. Maynard never learned
from Mr. Salinger is that writing has integrity that must reach from the
writer's soul into the reader's heart. This book reaches but only grasps
at straws of gossip, self-involvement, and phony feminism.
*****
On Thu, 12 Nov 1998, mepierce wrote:
> will, i would be interested in reading your review in your local paper.
> Can you tell me how to access this? thanks !
> --
> M.E. Pierce
> Dept. of English/ SFASU
> http://titan.sfasu.edu/~f_pierceme
> "and gladly would he lerne, and gladly teche." Chaucer
>