posthumous popularity contest
Will Salinger’s work get more respect now that he’s dead? It should:
It’s hard to know how to mourn a recluse—all we have is the absence of an absence. Maybe, at least, this will be good for the one part of Salinger that never left us: his books. It strikes me as unfair that The Catcher in the Rye has come to be ghettoized, over the years, as a slightly embarrassing young-adult novel—a stick of gum to chew on your way to the big square meal of Hemingway or Fitzgerald—and that Salinger’s name is invoked most often as dismissive shorthand for the kind of self-satisfied uptown preciousness you find in, say, a bad Wes Anderson movie. Maybe this second layer of absence—his new, permanent, involuntary invisibility—will bring people back to the living richness of his work.
the revolution is being covered
… but I haven’t written about it (it’s covered well here, among many other places).
Media disaggregation isn’t among my strong interests, even although it certainly affects me—or will affect me more soon—professionally.
GalleyCat updates us on This Week in Book Publishing Warfare:
Macmillan received a supportive standing ovation at an industry program yesterday. GalleyCat was interviewed about the future of $9.99 eBooks. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has dipped his toe into the eBook pricing debate. Macmillan author John Scalzi has rejected boycott and urged readers to buy books instead. Meanwhile, some Amazon customers continue to boycott Kindle books priced higher than $9.99. As of this writing, 1,724 different comments have been posted in response to Amazon’s note to customers about the price war.
I mentioned to someone yesterday that the comments to Amazon’s note come from a self-selected group (of people who get online to voice their opinion) and don’t represent the entire universe of future customers of e-books.
updated to add the latest round in the skirmishes:
Macmillan NYT Ad: “Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon”
This is all going to take a long time to shake out. On the side of the consumer, I believe strongly that until people are able to create their own libraries of “content,” which they can annotate, archive, and retrieve (not to mention share, borrow, and resell), the market for e-books will remain small.
Amazon revealed the impermanent nature of the content it offered on the Kindle during the Orwell Incident. People realized that e-books were not the same at all as paper books. They’re convenient and they fulfill the need for instant gratification. But they’re not quite yours.
People are very possessive about books. So the war will continue (though it won’t always be as hot as it seems from today’s headlines).
I’ll update this post from time to time.
even more on Salinger
updated
Readers will note that I’ve posted quite a bit about J. D. Salinger. I’m really interested to hear what others have to say about him and his work.
Gay Talese (see below) provides It’s important to understand the cultural context in which Salinger came up.
In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the United States was in the midst of one of its periodic literary flowerings, and Salinger was part of it, along with Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron and others. Like them he had been in the military service in World War II, but unlike them, he did not write about the war in Asia or the war at home. And unlike them he didn’t write massive novels.
He knew how to compress, how to convey more of a sense of wisdom with fewer words, and to be poetic. In his books, he brought the country away from wartime to peacetime, though he also showed us a country that was troubled; teenagers, like Holden Caulfield, were alienated, and the grown-ups felt alienated and alone, too, and sometimes even suicidal. “The Catcher in the Rye” presented life on a human scale, without big armies and big bureaucracies, and so it touched the innermost folds of the human heart.
Without understanding that, it’s hard to understand the impression he left on his first admirers (which in turn cemented his reputation going forward, because it was his first fans who disseminated him into the wider culture. People in a position to spread his work [mostly Catcher] did so because they remembered the experience of bonding with Holden Caulfield, or, if they were serious readers [or writers themselves], of wondering how he could get away with breaking so many rules of conventional narrative and still hold our undivided attention, often to the point of mesmerization.
More on cultural context from Gay Talese:
Word got around that there was a story in the works that was going to be published soon, and we waited for it. … It was still the era of Eisenhower. And yet it was a kind of beginning of a kind of identity with youth—it wasn’t a youth movement, as would happen later with the Beatles and Bobby Dylan and the war protests of the ’60s and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and all that stuff—but there was really something that gave identity to young people in the work of Salinger. A sort of an epochal time for the printed word.
I don’t remember anything before it, because I was too young to know anything before it—when Hemingway was around. It was the Sundance of the short story in those days. People really wanted to be writers. We didn’t give a shit about Oscars, it seemed to me. It was the literary word, and the printed word—it was the quintessential time for the printed word.
So this was the seedbed: it was the golden age of the printed word, when everyone wanted to be a writer. But wait! There’s more!
Salinger was a person of the ’50s. He is a product of the pre-Kennedy time. I mean, that was the period of being old. It’s the last of “I like Ike” and playing golf, and here’s this new voice, and it’s a young voice. Here comes this voice not of protest but of a most uncommon character. … And it really seemed to be the first legitimate young American voice on the printed page that had all the power and song of what would later be in the words of Bobby Dylan, or the Beatles, or the music of Motown.
Salinger offered the sound of a new generation from the printed page at a time when all eyes were on writers as the artists everyone envied. Then there was the viral character of the advance word-of-mouth about him—which in itself was unusual for the times.
Before Tina Brown thought of buzz, there was this buzz. I’d never heard any word of mouth on an about-to-be-published short story … . It never happened with Roth or Updike or Don DeLillo or anybody [else].
Then there was a conversation! There was a debate. Half an evening’s meal was spent discussing this. This was very much what was going on. …—you heard about Salinger. Nothing was quite like it. I don’t think we had another person. And Salinger was not self-promoting—the opposite. That’s what so special. It was all about his work.
Buzz all about his work? Unheard-of!
That’s because with Salinger, it was all about the writing. Talese concludes:
The stories—“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Love and Squalor”—I mean, I read all these stories six times when they came out. I’d read them again and again and again. They’re just beautiful.
You couldn’t dare think that voice would be something of your own voice. It was a special voice, not to be imitated—or that you could even think that you understood fully what was in that brain of his. But you loved the fact that he was saying something that you could identify with. It wasn’t that his language was so evocative—he just had control of his story and his era. He just was a new man on the planet. And he carried us away.
Yep. And some people long to be carried away to that planet again, and so they hope that there are more Salinger stories and that their author will have made provisions for their posthumous publication.
straight to the heart
In writing about Salinger, some wear their heart on their sleeve. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Adam Gopnik [emphasis added]:
Critics fretted about the growing self-enclosure of Salinger’s work, about a faith in his characters’ importance that sometimes seemed to make a religion of them. But the isolation of his later decades should not be allowed to obscure his essential gift for joy. The message of his writing was always the same: that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unself-conscious innocence that still surround us (with the hovering unease that one might mistake emptiness for innocence, as Seymour seems to have done with his Muriel). It resides in the particular things that he delighted to record. In memory, his writing is a catalogue of those moments: Esmé’s letter and her broken watch; and the little girl with the dachshund that leaps up on Park Avenue, in “Zooey”; and the record of “Little Shirley Beans” that Holden buys for Phoebe (and then sees break on the pavement); and Phoebe’s coat spinning on the carrousel at twilight in the December light of Central Park; and the Easter chick left in the wastebasket at the end of “Just Before the War with the Eskimos”; and Buddy, at the magic twilight hour in New York, after learning from Seymour how to play Zen marbles (“Could you try not aiming so much?”), running to get Louis Sherry ice cream, only to be overtaken by his brother; and the small girl on the plane who turns her doll’s head around to look at Seymour. That these things were not in themselves quite enough to hold Seymour on this planet—or enough, it seems, at times, to hold his creator entirely here, either—does not diminish the beauty of their realization. In “Seymour: An Introduction,” Seymour, thinking of van Gogh, tells Buddy that the only question worth asking about a writer is “Were most of your stars out?” Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.
[...]
The Hapworth book never materialized. The publisher gave an interview to a local magazine, and Salinger decided his new friend was a phony after all. But before things went bad, around the time of Salinger’s visit, I realized that I wanted to see what kind of writing could inspire such frenzied devotion. One night, I grabbed copies of his books off the shelf opposite my desk and devoured them in a weekend. These were not, as I’d thought, precious, nostalgic trifles of old New York, but strange, difficult, and, in many ways, deeply weird pieces of fiction. Salinger’s narrative voice, 30, 40 years later, felt as fresh and shocking as any of the contemporary writers I was reading at the time—Mary Gaitskill, Martin Amis, Jonathan Franzen—or more so, even. He broke every rule and, with some exceptions, got away with it.
[...] People often talk about outgrowing Salinger, about returning to Catcher as an adult and finding it silly, histrionic, annoying. But the stories have grown with me, as the best fictions do. I still have some of those letters—the letters I couldn’t bear to throw in the trash—and I look at them from time to time, too, if I’m feeling strong enough. They still break my heart, those old bastards, almost as much as the work that inspired them.
To be open to Salinger, you have to let down your defenses and allow yourself to feel. That’s not exactly in keeping with the times.
More’s the pity, because it’s good medicine.
a writer’s ways
from a piece on Don DeLillo:
His approach to writing borders on obsessive. He fixates on the shapes of letters and words, and judges each phrase for its visual appearance as well as its rhythm and clarity.
That’s weird.
Sometimes, Mr. DeLillo says, he will swap out a word for a more rhythmically appealing one, even if it alters the meaning of the sentence.
That’s even weirder. Why would you want to change the meaning of your sentence unless it wasn’t expressing what you wanted in the first place?
He often types up a single paragraph at a time, using a clean sheet of paper for each paragraph, so that he can study the architecture of each passage in isolation.
That’s a waste of trees … but it’s a good technique for revision.
the new generation gap
A bunch of teachers write in the New York Times that their students don’t relate at all to Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.
The teenagers respond: “What are those cynics talking about? We love this book! We relate to it!”
exercising their critical muscles
It’s refreshing to see so many column inches (or pixels) devoted not just to news of J. D. Salinger’s death but to assessments of his work and its impact on American culture.
Robert Fulford has one view—that Catcher had a major impact on our culture but was inferior (as literature) to Huck Finn:
[...] In 1951, with Catcher in the Rye, Mr. Salinger found himself discussed as a kind of generational spokesman. His hero, Holden Caulfield, is a vaguely damaged and disturbed teenager, expelled from his private boarding school and drifting around New York.
[ ...] The creation of Holden anticipated the complaints of millions of young people whose discontent created what North Americans, a decade later, were calling “the generation gap.” By the 1960s Catcher in the Rye was the kind of book in which millions of people could see a clear reflection of their own unhappiness. It was as much a symptom as a novel; eventually it became a crucial part of the experience of several generations.
Catcher in the Rye is often compared to Huckleberry Finn, but when read more than once it lacks the moral force of Mark Twain’s greatest book.
Both books have enormous charm and a fine sense of period. But Huck acts out a tormenting moral problem, a conflict between what society has taught him (slaves are the private property of their owner) and what he comes to believe (decency demands he help Jim go free). It’s at once a personal dilemma and the gravest ethical issue of nineteenth-century American life. Holden Caulfield, on the other hand, worries about personal authenticity and expresses his dislike of the “phonies” he runs into. They are both troubled young fellows, but the troubles of Huck are universal, the troubles of Holden limited to a certain kind of American adolescent. [...] [emphasis added]
Coming at Salinger from different perspective altogether—that is, discounting the (social) impact that Holden Caulfield might have had on the inner life of American teenagers—David Lodge, in New York Times op-ed, sticks to analyzing Salinger’s literary merits [emphasis added]:
The corpus of his good work is very small, but it is classic. His was arguably the first truly original voice in American prose fiction after the generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Of course nothing is absolutely original in literature, and Mr. Salinger had his precursors, of whom Hemingway was one, and Mark Twain — from whose Huck Finn Hemingway said that all modern American literature came — another. From them he learned what you could do with simple, colloquial language and a naïve youthful narrator. But in “The Catcher in the Rye” Mr. Salinger applied their lessons in a new way to create a new kind of hero, Holden Caulfield, whose narrative voice struck a chord with millions of readers. [...] It looks easy, but it isn’t.
Lodge also suggests that Salinger’s true literary genius—on display in Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction—wasn’t recognized by the literary establishment, although in fact Salinger prefigured (or anticipated) the postmodern fracturing of narrative structure and switching between points-of-view (giving us an unreliable narrator) and that he was an experimenter on par with Laurence Sterne in Tristam Shandy:
[Salinger's other] books challenged conventional notions of fiction and conventional ways of reading as radically as the kind of novels that would later be called post-modernist, and a lot of critics didn’t “get it.” The saga of the Glass family is stylistically the antithesis of “Catcher” — highly literary, full of rhetorical tropes, narrative devices and asides to the reader — but there is also continuity between them. The literariness of the Glass stories is always domesticated by a colloquial informality. Most are narrated by Buddy, the writer in the family, who says at the outset of “Zooey” that “what I’m about to offer isn’t really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie.”
The nearest equivalent to this saga in earlier literature is perhaps the 18th-century antinovel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” by Laurence Sterne. There is the same minutely close observation of the social dynamics of family life, the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative structure, the same teasing hints that the fictional narrator is a persona for the real author, the same delicate balance of sentiment and irony, and the same humorous running commentary on the activities of writing and reading.
I’d like to remind readers that Salinger was playful. If indeed he broke with narrative convention, he made it plain in the dedication of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction that he was looking to entertain his readers:
“If there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children. “
Of course he did more than entertain those of us who grew up reading him in the 1960s.
Christopher Hitchens picks up on Salinger’s mournfulness:
To be a catcher is to miss one’s dead brother and wish to protect one’s little sister, and to want the world to be more gentle and easy and honest. To have been the creator – and the halting but unforgettable voice – of such a catcher is to have had the sort of flirtation with immortality that perhaps necessitates withdrawal from the world.
J. D. Salinger, reclusive author whose Catcher in the Rye caught the mood of a generation, is dead … Charles McGrath … AP … Stephen Miller … Elaine Woo … London Times … Bart Barnes … FT … TelegraphMark Krupnick … Richard Lacayo … Tom Leonard … Martin Levin … Rick Moody … Richard Lea … Malcolm Jones … Morgan Meis … Chris Wilson … Robert Fulford … Ian Shapira … Michael Ruse … Christopher Reynolds … David Usborne … Joe Gross … Stephen King … John WalshHenry Allen … Mark Feeney … Ron Rosenbaum (1997) … John Timpane … Alex Beam … Verlyn Klinkenborg … Tom McGlaughlin … David Ulin … his neighbors … Mark Medley … Stephen Metcalf and Slate staff … John Wenke … Jeff Simon … Tom Leonard … Andrea Sachs … David Lodge … Christopher Hitchens … Lionel Shriver … Barbara Kay … Nathanial Rich … Holden’s heirs … Lillian Ross … Adam Gopnik … John Seabrook … Dave Eggers … new photos … Mark Bauerlein et al. in NYTAdam Kirsch … Colby Cosh … A.M. Homes … Martin Amis et al. … Robert McCrum … Julian Barnes et al. … Joan Smith … Adam Golub … Jonathan Yardley on “Salinger’s execrable prose and Caulfield’s jejune narcissism” (2004). … … …
why so ashamed?
Snarky snobbery is of course the default attitude for writers at the Daily Beast, and William Boot, reviewing the hit novel The Help, doesn’t disappoint on that score:
Look, I’m not the ideal reader for The Help. I’m not a middle-aged woman. I’ve never been to Mississippi. I’m not turned on by the smell of grits. I hate plucky heroines. And when I read a bestselling novel, the last thing I want is to be reminded of is that we are all one people.
But here I was the other day on a cross-country flight, and I was devouring this book that sits atop the Times bestseller list. … I may not be in the target audience for The Help, but I read every plucky page. Good bestsellers are so hard to find. [emphasis added]
Boot loved the book, though, and recommended it without reservation. After all, “devouring this book” is the experience that first hooked us on books when we were young.
It’s the experience we readers crave every time we crack the pages of a new story: to be transported.
This novel, written in the early 21st century by a white woman about the segregated South of the 1960s, seems to have done the trick for Boot. His reservations are professional [emphasis added]:
My only problem with The Help is that, in the end, it’s not really about the help. For all her assurance in sketching out the foibles of the Junior League, Stockett is shakier when it comes to the maids. They never quite come into focus—they’re more useful for what they see rather than who they are. There’s a scene on Page 255 where Minny and Aibileen and the others gather in the African-American section of town to tell Skeeter their life stories. Skeeter records the stories, but Stockett never shares them with us, a whopping omission. It is an unusual thing when the book you’re holding doesn’t measure up to the one main character is writing.
From an editorial point of view, it looks like the author fell down a bit in the “show, don’t tell” department. Well, she wrote an otherwise engaging story, and nobody’s perfect! I’ve read more than a few bestsellers—and I’ve read way, way, way more wannabe bestsellers—and I’m here to tell you that a first novel that grabs and holds the reader’s inescapable attention is a rare thing indeed.
Janet Maslin, reviewing the book in the New York Times last February, immediately recognized its appeal. The Help was “soon to be wildly popular,” she wrote. It was also “problematic,” she said, foreshadowing the controversy that would emerge [emphasis added]:
The trouble on the pages of Skeeter’s book is nothing compared with the trouble Ms. Stockett’s real book risks getting into. Here is a debut novel by a Southern-born white author who renders black maids’ voices in thick, dated dialect. (“Law have mercy,” one says, when asked to cooperate with the book project. “I reckon I’m on do it.”) It’s a story that purports to value the maids’ lives while subordinating them to Skeeter and her writing ambitions. And it celebrates noblesse oblige so readily that Skeeter’s act of daring earns her a gift from a local black church congregation. “This one, this is for the white lady,” the Reverend of that church says. “You tell her we love her, like she’s our own family.”
This is where worlds collide. In my world, an author who wants to create utterly believable characters and thus renders them as flesh and blood and places them inside their reality—in this case, the South of the 1960s—is a good storyteller. Plausibility and verisimilitude are essential ingredients of an engaging story.
In the world of “criticism,” however, The Help stirred a lot of (fake and stupid) controversy. How dare a white author write about black maids in the South? was the tenor of the argument, according to this piece in the HuffPo.
Readers, however, loved it—even though (or perhaps because) they had to grapple with some discomfort. (Moral indignation, born of identifying with beloved characters who are being mistreated, is a memorable component of the reading experience: your emotions are engaged.)
In a November 2009 New York Times feature, Motoko Rich elicited a range of opinions from black readers:
Some black readers say “The Help” peddles some familiar stereotypes. [...]
One of them [emphasis added]:
described the novel as “racist” on her blog, Gerbera Daisy Diaries (gerberadaisydiaries.blogspot.com). “But I want to read the African-American version of ‘The Help,’ ” she said.
Fair point! And I’ll get back to it later. Meanwhile:
Tiffinee Armstrong, a co-coordinator of Enlightened ConNexTions, a book group in Raleigh, N.C., said she was initially taken aback when she learned that Ms. Stockett was white. But after reading the book, Ms. Armstrong, who is black, said, “I thought she really grabbed hold of the dialect really well and really gave a lot of insight into what was going on in Mississippi.” Besides, she added, “it was definitely a page-turner.”
Karla F C Holloway, a professor of English and law at Duke University, raved about the novel as “beautifully written” and said Ms. Stockett was clearly aware of the “racial tightrope she’s walking.”
But Ms. Holloway, who is black, said Ms. Stockett’s identity pointed to a broader conundrum in publishing and the culture generally.
“Who gets to tell those stories in a way that they earn public attention?” Ms. Holloway asked. “It seems to me to reflect our bias about whom we trust as a storyteller.” [emphasis added]
I can answer that: The best storytellers—the ones who capture the imagination of a broad cross-section of readers—are the ones who earn public attention. It’s not a race thing. It’s a writing talent thing. As readers, we are biased toward the most believable story. And the storyteller who delivers that is the one we trust the most.
As for the woman who wants to read the African-American version of The Help: so do I! Indeed, I look forward to it. But that’s a different book!
Bottom line: whether you’re white, yellow, black, brown, or a “mutt,” writing a good book is hard.
readers want it all
GalleyCat reports on a recent survey about reading habits [emphasis added]:
“Avid readers are using their eReaders to supplement their print reading habits. There is an emerging hybrid market–they will continue to buy books but split those purchases [between eBooks and print books],” [Jack McKeown] said, cheering up the publishing crowd.
He also noted that a staggering two-thirds of avid readers surveyed were 45 or older. In contrast, only 28 percent were in the 18+ bracket. Publishers face two unique challenges: keeping the baby boomer readers as they retire and building new readers with a younger generation.
Most dramatically, the survey focused on the maximum price avid readers would pay for eBooks. According to the results, 27 to 28 percent of the avid readers surveyed will not pay more than $10. “They have been converted to Amazon price range,” explained McKeown. However, 37 percent of the readers said they aren’t sure how much they would pay. “Somewhere in the $10 to $18 range there may be a sweet spot,” concluded McKeown.
No surprises here for me (although I had no preconceptions about the eventual price of e-books and I think talk about pricing is pure speculation until there are more titles available—and, specifically, more midlist and backlist books … not to mention until there’s a serious market for e-books).
As I’ve said before, print books will be with us for a good long while, and I think we should enjoy the embarrassment of riches available to us regardless of the format.The market will sort itself out. Meanwhile, we should keep reading and writing.
