Have you seen the trailer for Salinger?
Pretty intense music, eh? One expects a spaceship to crash into the Empire State Building or something. What secrets shall be revealed? Probably the existence of a safe deposit box or two.
Well, I like Salinger even though that's pretty much the least cool thing in the world now. Which is to say that for people older than I am, Salinger is often a meaningful author, and for those younger than me he is often widely loathed as he is part of the school curriculum, and pretty much the worst thing he wrote is what is taught. That, and anti-productivity narratives generally are viewed with suspicion these days.
Salinger's influence on my own writing is hardly a secret. Jamie Mason twigged to it years ago, writing Like J.D. Salinger (an obvious but unacknowledged influence), Mamatas seeks to touch the reader without becoming his friend. Lavie Tidhar, writing about my novel narrated by spiders, noted that it is Salinger, specifically, I think, who informs Mamatas’ voice.
And, of course, there is my story “Four is Me! With squeeeeee! (And LOLer)”. Duh.
Anyway, I started thinking about Salinger again the other day when my friend CV said, on Gchat, that she was finally reading the Glass family stories and thought that she understood me better now. So what's going on?
A few things. It's a conversational tone that can still impart a lot of information—personal, social, even theological material. His dialogue is often extremely powerful, and the stories have a ragged edge at the end. Even when they end in suicide—"He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple"—there is a sense of life continuing rather than a pat bit of nonsense. At the same time, there's little in the way of so-called epiphanies that infect literary fiction. When the imaginary Jimmy Jimereeno gets hit by a car, it's in the middle of the story.
And, of course, like anything else that becomes a mass consumer product, Salinger—and anti-Salinger—is a form of identity signifier. I have a habit, from my school days, of scanning bookshelves when I enter a room. Back when I was young and wild, I could spot a willing sexual partner based largely on the presence of a copy of Nine Stories on a shelf. So, the documentary? Surely more of the same. It'll get the audience Salinger stuff usually gets, and write-ups by earnest types in the correct magazines (spoiler: they'll find the film disappointing), and then people will go back to grousing, or re-reading, or passing the books along. But this is the last little bit. Let's ask some actors what they think—and the youngest person they can come up with is John Cusack (b. 1966). And all the kids named Holden by their literary parents? They'll just get old and become phonies, like all the rest.
Pretty intense music, eh? One expects a spaceship to crash into the Empire State Building or something. What secrets shall be revealed? Probably the existence of a safe deposit box or two.
Well, I like Salinger even though that's pretty much the least cool thing in the world now. Which is to say that for people older than I am, Salinger is often a meaningful author, and for those younger than me he is often widely loathed as he is part of the school curriculum, and pretty much the worst thing he wrote is what is taught. That, and anti-productivity narratives generally are viewed with suspicion these days.
Salinger's influence on my own writing is hardly a secret. Jamie Mason twigged to it years ago, writing Like J.D. Salinger (an obvious but unacknowledged influence), Mamatas seeks to touch the reader without becoming his friend. Lavie Tidhar, writing about my novel narrated by spiders, noted that it is Salinger, specifically, I think, who informs Mamatas’ voice.
And, of course, there is my story “Four is Me! With squeeeeee! (And LOLer)”. Duh.
Anyway, I started thinking about Salinger again the other day when my friend CV said, on Gchat, that she was finally reading the Glass family stories and thought that she understood me better now. So what's going on?
A few things. It's a conversational tone that can still impart a lot of information—personal, social, even theological material. His dialogue is often extremely powerful, and the stories have a ragged edge at the end. Even when they end in suicide—"He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple"—there is a sense of life continuing rather than a pat bit of nonsense. At the same time, there's little in the way of so-called epiphanies that infect literary fiction. When the imaginary Jimmy Jimereeno gets hit by a car, it's in the middle of the story.
And, of course, like anything else that becomes a mass consumer product, Salinger—and anti-Salinger—is a form of identity signifier. I have a habit, from my school days, of scanning bookshelves when I enter a room. Back when I was young and wild, I could spot a willing sexual partner based largely on the presence of a copy of Nine Stories on a shelf. So, the documentary? Surely more of the same. It'll get the audience Salinger stuff usually gets, and write-ups by earnest types in the correct magazines (spoiler: they'll find the film disappointing), and then people will go back to grousing, or re-reading, or passing the books along. But this is the last little bit. Let's ask some actors what they think—and the youngest person they can come up with is John Cusack (b. 1966). And all the kids named Holden by their literary parents? They'll just get old and become phonies, like all the rest.