shoop and salinger

There's a moment in "Zooey" where the title character is in the bathtub re-reading a four-year-old letter from his older brother. The letter and the letter writer give Zooey no end of annoyance, but something keeps pulling him back, even to the point of taking the darn thing in the full tub with him--not the best place to read something composed of aging, fragile paper to begin with. I've yet to bring Franny and Zooey--or Nine Stories, or Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, or Catcher in the Rye into a tub with me, but I do go back to them for...well, something, even though I often think to myself as I read and re-read, wow, these are incredibly annoying people.

As Salinger played more and more with self-reflexiveness, meta-fiction, Zen, and just plain not giving a damn whether his stories had any shape or purpose, the how-hard-this-stuff-is-to-get-to-the-end-of quotient ratcheted up exponentially. With "Zooey," at least, the patient reader is rewarded with a knockout wrap-up that actors (or at least a lot of actors I know) just love--that if you're an actor, you're pretty much acting for God (I think most actors believe that already, but it's nice to have it confirmed). And "Raise High the Roofbeam" is probably the most accessible Buddy-driven story, if you can get past Seymour's diary entries. But the end of "Seymour--An Introduction"? There's an ending that just makes you want to toss your book across the room or out an open window. And yet...yeah, I keep going back to it. (Although I've never quite made it through "Hapworth 16, 1924"--that one's a real ball-buster.)

And it's not just because I'm starting to "get" what Salinger left behind--the kinds of entertainment for which you can give him credit. Characters who probably don't realize how obnoxious they are? I tend to think of the "meta" Larry David on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" as an aging Zooey (Zooey, in fact, would be 80 this year, while Franny would be 75)--and again, we can think of the "meta" persona Salinger left behind in the ever-loquacious Buddy. And the way Salinger playfully capitalizes some words? Now read some David Mamet and watch what he does with his dialogue. A quick google search, especially over the next couple of days, will give you many more examples, both "high" and "low," I'm sure.

What keeps me coming back, I think, points back to how I referred to Salinger's characters at the beginning--they're people. What Salinger mastered in his dialogue is a remarkable combination of "who the hell says things like that" (i.e., "This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age" from "Zooey") plus a composer's ear for sound and rhythm that really did capture people actually talking. At its best, that combination convinced you that, okay, these people said things like that. You could easily run hot and cold with all of Salinger's characters--for me, Holden Caulfield was, depending on when you asked me between, say, high school and now, a super-cool guy who "got" what being a teenager meant, a spoiled prep-school tool, and a sad, mixed-up kid. Of course, he's all of those things and more--because he's a person, and people are that complicated and contradictory, engaging and maddening.

At any rate, I like to imagine Salinger now, chatting with the Fat Lady on her porch. It's a "Zooey" reference--if you haven't already, pay him a visit.