Narrative Junkie

Gopnick on Salinger

I really like this tribute to J.D. Salinger by Adam Gopnick in The New Yorker, which includes this:

"As for Holden Caulfield, he is so much a part of the lives of his readers that he is more a person to phone up than a character to analyze."

Very true.

J.D. Salinger's lost Seymour story

The life and works of J.D. Salinger have been much in the news after his recent death, and if you've been reading about him you probably know his last published work was "Hapworth16, 1924," which took up most of the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker. The story takes the form of a long letter written to his parents by a seven-year old Seymour Glass (Franny and Zooey's older brother, who committed suicide in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish") from summer camp. It has never been published in any other form, and I once read that you couldn't even get a hold of it in back issues of The New Yorker collected at libraries, because Salinger fans had torn them all out.

Several years ago, however, I found a Hungarian web site that had published all of Salinger's work, not only including "Hapworth," but also his early, far less literary and accomplished stories. I checked in on the site the day he died, and it was still up. Today, I see that after all these years, it's finally been taken down.

Through the magic of Google caching, however, the web site lives on. So here now is "Hapworth 16,1924," the Glass-family story that almost no one has read. (You can also find it on the The New Yorker's online archive, but you have to have a subscription to the magazine. It's also available on the CD set of every issue the magazine released for sale a few years ago.)

Ironically for me, when I started to read the story (really a novella) a few years back, I just couldn't finish it. I thought it was by far the worst thing Salinger wrote in his post Catcher in the Rye days, an extremely unbelievable portrait of a child who is also a holy man/genius. Most critics felt the same way, and one theory of Salinger's subsequent hermitage and retirement from publishing is that it was in reality a giant fit over the story's reception.

If you're interested, better read it now, before someone discovers the Google loophole...

Amazon.com top books

Amazon editors pick their best books of 2009.

100 best English-language novels since 1923

According to Time. I've read 42 of them. Fun fact: Watchmen is on the list.

Postmodernism defined

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly" because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence.

                                                                                                -Umberto Eco

Lots and lots of novels

My friend Chris posted this on Facebook:

• 1000 novels everyone must read (Guardian)

The Witches of Eastwick

The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Updike is quite a stylist, and Van Horn's sermon at the end is one of the more brilliant pieces of dialogue I've read in a novel. But does anyone else think this book comes perilously close to misogyny? View all my reviews >>

The last days of Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll's Long Way Home (NY Times)

IT’S not easy to come up with a second act when your first act was being Jim Carroll.

He was the author of “The Basketball Diaries,” a cult-classic memoir of his drug-fueled misadventures as a teenager in the 1960s; he then became a celebrated downtown poet; and then, the star of his own hit rock band.

Mr. Carroll had lived a panoramic New York youth that his fans had turned into legend.

But by the time he died of a heart attack this Sept. 11 at 60, Mr. Carroll, who had once hung out with the Rolling Stones and Allen Ginsberg, no longer bore much resemblance to the downtown cover-boy with the chiseled cheekbones and flowing red hair. full article

Book review - Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?

Eric Carle and Bill Martin, Jr. cheapen what once was the great Bear franchise with this egregious piece of dung. After the lyrical, almost mystical revelation that was "Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?" let's hope this woeful follow-up is relegated to the ashheep of history and Carle and Martin are put to death for their heinous crime. Polar Bear, Polar Bear, you know what I see? I see a grotesque exploitation of little children and a soulless money-making machine that needs to be dismantled by anyone who cares about children's literature in the United States. SCREW YOU, CARLE and SCREW YOU BILL MARTIN, JR. for warming my cockles with the magic of make-believe only to then douse them in the cold water of commercial reality. Those of us who will no longer put up with a few doodles and some half-baked, puerile prose-poetry passed off as enchanting whimsy--we are legion, and WE surround YOU.

Please email me for more information on what I am calling the September 26th Project -- that's the birthday of my darling little girl, who deserves a better world than the one SCUM like Carle and Martin, Jr. wish to create.

Thank you.

For George Klein

The Man Who Was the Child is Dead

At 46,
George is dead

He could not short-hop
a burst blood vessel
with kid first-baseman's glove.
He could not avoid,
a fatal rupture,
with the right dice roll.

No more jumpshots,
Hebrew classes,
popcorn runs
Algebra woes.
(X=death)

No more catch
in yielding light
till the white ball fades.
Our bodies spectral,
yet still alive.

-Jon Brooks