Esquire Review


Subject: Esquire Review
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliabaader@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Oct 24 2001 - 15:01:53 GMT


I like the cover of the book ... go to the website for more information.

--C.

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With Love & Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D. Salinger
by Kip Kotzen

Read today's review in HTML at:
http://www.powells.com/esq/review/2001_10_24

A review by Brian Allnutt

J. D. Salinger: the literary father figure whom many of us would
have been content to have left behind in junior high. Too bad
the recurring themes of his work -- suicide, loneliness, failure
and questions of identity aren't limited to adolescence. It's
been fifty years since The Catcher In the Rye was published, and
his influence hasn't, for better or worse, started to wane. The
essays in With Love and Squalor are, for the most part, smart
and witty explorations of Salinger's role as a father to a generation
of writers, and readers, who, as Thomas Beller writes in his essay,
are going to "have to kill Daddy. Or love him. Or both."

Alexander Hemon, Walter Kirn, Jane Mendhelsohn, and Emma Forest,
writers who are aware of what it means to be writing both in the
shadow and space of Salinger, contribute the smartest and most
lucid essays in this collection of fourteen pieces. "(W)e were
all fucked by Salinger," English novelist Emma Forest writes in
her essay "Salinger's Daughter: Whining Bitch": "He never rang,
he wouldn't return our calls and he didn't even acknowledge our
presence. He left no scent on the pillow. He wasn't even that
good in bed. But he did get all of us our jobs." What emerges
here, more than anything else, is a sense of frustration: frustration
with Salinger's popularity, his critics, and the pervasiveness
of his influence, especially in first person narrative....

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