There are unpardonable vices and then there’s reading peripheral Salinger before you even touch Catcher in the Rye. I fully admit woeful ignorance of Holden Caulfield’s angst and wanderings. Up until now, I’ve spent a perfect day with bananafish and that’s it. I hit my roaring twenties in a matter of months so the window I have for appreciating J.D. with angsty, teenage abandon may not be blowing its draft in for much longer. In the meantime, here’s what I thought about my time staring through a Glass darkly.
I started paging through On the Road a few days prior to starting this and couldn’t finish the slog. You could pick up Kerouac’s self-consciousness with a Geiger counter. He’s not tragically unaware of himself, he’s much too aware. The nation is traversed and details are left in and left out because he’s constructing an edifice to what’s hip in 50s America. Salinger is championed by angsty kids everywhere but I wonder if we are in on the joke. He peoples Franny & Zooey with characters like Kerouac, guys and girls with Nietzsche on their bedstead and A Love Supreme on their turntable, as a loving critique. Adolescent anger is understood but not justified. Franny and her brother are equally intelligent, equally aware of each other’s faults and logical inconsistencies and equally oblivious to their individual egotism.
The story revolves around the concept that intelligence wrecks innocence and that religious devotion is but another self-inflating pursuit. At the center of every human heart is the desire for acquisition. Franny and Zooey Glass scoff at those who coif their hair in a certain way, who namedrop all the wrong people, and its a point of catharsis when Zooey points out the flaw in their precocious logic. The Beats, the Hipsters, the subcultural assault squadron: none of these can appropriately critique mainline culture because they are just its alternative manifestation. Whether trafficking in plebeian pursuits or high-culture oddities, this we all have in common. The two stories, if anything, are a thinly veiled critique of critique itself. Men and women all have different ways of being the same.
Salinger uses too many italics, on every level. His dialogue, his characterization and his ‘subtlety’ are all a tad too emphasized. He wants you to know the cadence with which the Glass family speaks and interacts to a tee. This may be his greatest strength but for this humble fellow, it detracted from the story. Indeed, what he tries to do through under-the-table moralizing might have been better to explicitly say in an essay than thinly veil in a story. But there I go critiquing. Another adventure in missing the point.
