Fat Books & Thin Women

J.D. Salinger evokes such strong response in people that I am never quite sure what to make of my middling opinion of him. I, too, was forced to read The Catcher in the Rye during my formative years (twice! once by my mother, once by a teacher), and after not getting it the first time, when I was maybe twelve years old, I liked it on the second read.

But everything he’s written, while striking me as “good” in a broad sort of way, doesn’t stick in my mind for more than a few days after I finish reading. When I can reread a book and not realize until halfway through that I’ve read it before, I tend to think there is something wrong with the writing rather than me. (You are free to disagree.)

Not to say that I don’t like Salinger. Franny and Zooey got the things I like about his writing (his ways of describing people) along with the things I dislike (his “tic-y” writing [all those italics and “goddamns”], lack of any significant storyline), thereby landing in the “not bad to pretty good” category of “books i been done read,” or something.

The book contains a short story, titled “Franny,” about Franny Glass and a lunch she has with her boyfriend, Lane, who thinks she is an “unimpeachably right-looking girl” who is not “too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt” (11). Throughout the story Lane asks about a book Franny is carrying, which she claims to have checked out of the school library but actually took from her dead brother Seymour’s room. Franny begins, in this story, to break down, which continues into the following novella about her brother, Zooey.

Occasionally Salinger comes out with these descriptions that are so apt or funny that I don’t think anyone else could have written them, as when Mrs. Glass, “a dedicated medicine cabinet gardener,” brings a package into the bathroom where Zooey is: “It appeared to contain an object roughly the size of the Hope diamond or an irrigation attachment” (73). Or later, when describing Franny’s crying: “She was in fact crying now, but in a very local sort of way, as it were; there were tears but no sounds” (150).

All to say that I think there’s a lot of needless hatred of Salinger, inspired mostly by high school English teachers, but that while there are some things he does well there are a few too many he doesn’t. If I could go back in time I wouldn’t not read Salinger, but I probably would have erased the period when I tried to write like Salinger by inserting “goddamns” into the mouth of all my characters and italicizing words or parts of words in about every goddamn sentence I wrote.