J.D. Salinger

The latest issue of Swans has brief reflections on his passing. Mine is below, all the rest can be read at http://www.swans.com/.

A Lesser Impact, With a Market — by Louis Proyect

I read The Catcher in the Rye in 1961 as a Bard College freshman. By then, I was a full-fledged member of the post-beat subculture and had been initiated to its A-list novelists and poets, from Jack Kerouac to Herman Hesse. As such, I found myself a bit underwhelmed by this tale of an alienated prep school student. While I had drunk from the bitter well of alienation myself, it was difficult to identify with such a scion of privilege.

Franny and Zooey made even less of an impact. Even though I was becoming more and more intrigued with Eastern religion, as we called it back then, I found the characters’ spiritual yearnings even more difficult to identify with than Holden Caulfield’s flight from “phoniness.” Looking back at the characters with hindsight, I suppose that I was put off by their narcissism. Indeed, I reacted to Salinger in much the same way I reacted to Woody Allen’s “serious” movies. Spiritual yearnings and neurotic tics do have a way of making me look at my watch. All that being said, nobody can deny Salinger’s ongoing influence. For as long as there are alienated teenagers, there will be a market for Salinger’s prose.