The word on the virtual street has it that J.D. Salinger's family will be releasing the author's previously unpublished works in the near future. Actually, I can pinpoint my precise level of insufferability even more exactly. I was riding with my friend and his son to get dinner when I heard the piece come on NPR. I shushed everyone in the car so that I could turn up the radio and listen to the news about the most English-majory of 20th century American authors. Every good English major already knew that Salinger had kept writing after he had withdrawn from the public and many of us thought about the treasure trove of material he must have been accumulating.
After hearing the news, I decided to dig up a couple of my old Salinger books to prepare. Just last night I finished reading Seymour an Introduction.
About the best and the worst thing that I can say about it is that it is pretty much what I remembered it to be. I guess the problem is more with me, the reader, returning to an author who had meant so much to me at a point when I was rather impressionable. This reader found some solace in Salinger's paradoxical blend of sincerity and irony that would prefigure such authors as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, and other of the so-called post-postmodern. It was new to me when I read it in college but now the irony seems worn and more cynical than I remember. The sincerity is also a bit thinner and edges into bathos. This is most likely a reflection of my own attitudes at different times in my life. The tropes have lost their shine, as it were.
I will read the new books when they come out. I am even planning on reading Franny and Zooey in the near future. There is a part of me, though, that hopes that Salinger will have aged a bit more in his writing away from the public.
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