. . . If you do, you start missing everybody.
A few of the best Salinger pieces I’ve read so far:
Dave Eggers writes for The New Yorker and considers what Salinger has been doing for the last half-century, and how this mystery gets to “the heart of writing iteself . . . given that the nature of written communication is social.”
Frank Portman writes for The Huffington Post about “The Catcher Cult” and his curious relationship with the novel that he uses in his first, wildly successful young adult fictional tale, King Dork. In it, the protagonist is Tom Henderson, a high school student who passionately despises all things Catcher-related. Here, Portman describes his Holden’s iconography and his approach to the novel:
Holden Caulfield, the icon, hovers over anything you write about teenagers whether your text specifically acknowledges it or not. My approach was to acknowledge the hell out of it and to play around with the well-established convention that everyone’s angsty, smart-ass teen narrator try as hard as he can to be mistaken for him. But I’m not some kind of anti-Salinger activist. I was just trying to be funny, honest.
David Lodge, author of The Art of Fiction (which includes a chapter examining Salinger’s use of “Teenage Skaz”), writes an Op-Ed contribution for The New York Times where he describes Salinger as a “Pre-Postmodernist” whose fiction was “was arguably the first truly original voice in American prose fiction after the generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner.”
And The Onion published this piece on his passing, where they report on how a “Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger.”
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Mr. Quale! I thought of our English class and Holden feeling like he was going to disappear when walking down streets when I read about Salinger’s death. And I, too, shamelessly used that quote in my blog too.. it makes me want to read Catcher again, but that might be a phony thing to do
Great minds think alike, I suppose, although I have no desire to read Catcher ever again. But I do need to refer more of my students to your wonderful blog. And I cannot believe you read Klosterman’s Downtown Owl before me (and kindof enjoyed reading it?).