Subject: Re: Tomorrow's NYTimes Book Review, p.23
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Sat Jul 28 2001 - 16:22:49 GMT
>I read this a "stretch break" as I write the afterward to Letters to
>Salinger. Although there are plenty of adolescent textures in the
>letters we will publish, there is a variety of approaches that range
>from scholarly and professional to the truth of youth. We hope to
>present a wide spectrum of reading responses that offer our readers
>more paths and insights into Salinger's fiction. I will say as much
>in a letter to the editor, but I'd like to hear other responses to
>"Holden Reconsidered and All."
I read it on a break from writing my own fiction, and am glad for the
contrast between what I was writing and what I read.
I took it as part of the slow-but-steady backlash against Holden that
is reminiscent of Salinger's critical reception. This essay more or
less painted Holden as an eternal adolescent. (This is critical
perception? It's like writing an essay asserting that the Sun is a
particularly bright star in these parts.) Well, he's as frozen
behind glass as are the Indians in the display cases at the Museum of
Natural History. Of COURSE he's permanently an adolescent. That's
part of his strength and his charm. His railings against the world
wouldn't sound quite right coming out of the mouth of a 29-year-old,
and so he is what he is, for better or worse.
I recall a period in my post-adolescent period when CATCHER was my
least favorite Salinger book, because I thought it was a little
embarrassing; I felt that I had moved beyond those criticisms of
society and was more interested in the more enduring concerns of the
Glass family. Now, after yet more years, I have come around the
circle, and appreciate both. I certainly can listen to Holden with
much greater sympathy. For instance, I hear an echo in my head every
morning in the shower about how adult life means riding the Madison
Avenue bus and taking elevators and talking about how many miles to
the gallon your car gets. (I don't have a car, but in my world you
can just as easily transpose the conversation to "How many gigabytes
does your hard disk have?" or "What's the speed of your CPU?")
I guess that Shulevitz has a point, if the point she is making is
that you can't feel that raw, almost ferocious, identification with
Holden in adulthood as you felt in adolescence. I'll grant her that.
But there's still the melancholy youth who can't help pointing out
the foibles of the adults around him, yet who dreads the oncoming
inevitable adult world that awaits him, and who knows that no matter
how much he dreams of evading it by being a catcher in the rye, the
unavoidable fact is that he will need to grow up (or die -- to be
jaundiced and realistic about one of the alternatives taken by some
of his contemporaries), and will have to face it, no matter how
distasteful an option it is for him at his age at the end of the book.
I would even go so far as to say that if we accept the premise that
Holden is institutionalized at the end of the book, there's a good
chance that one of the conditions surrounding his release is his
acceptance of this inevitability of oncoming adulthood. He may have
talked through his objections to all of it outside the frame of the
book, but I would guess that (also outside the frame of the book) the
doctors treating him pushed him unyieldingly in the direction of
accepting the inevitable, and not agreeing to his release until he
showed realistic acceptance of this fate.
Thanks for the pointer, Will!
(I went looking for a URL for the article, but the article doesn't
seem to have been posted yet to the Times site. Today is Saturday,
and the Book Review does not officially appear in its entirety on the
web site until tomorrow. There are bits and pieces of it there now,
and of course Will, like me, is a subscriber and gets it early, but
it should be there tomorrow. You need an account to get on the Times
site, but accounts are free.)
--tim
-- - * Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message * UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Sep 10 2001 - 15:29:40 GMT