g.d., J.D.

J.D. Salinger died, at 91, out in Cornish at his hermit house. At first glance it didn’t seem like that big of a deal – I’m not one for stalking authors personally and I always avoid reading about J.D.’s personal life in particular because the accounts are so controversial. But as the fact sunk into my infamously dense understanding, I realized that it is a big deal. It’s a big, goddamn deal.

Now I’m not trying to be cute and Salinger-y by throwing around the curse words. I am just trying to get at, in a round about and too conversational way, the fact that Salinger’s works are very important to me. Not Cather in the Rye specifically, though I was overjoyed to hear a coworker mention the novel as the most pretension novel in their name-dropping arsenal. I am more enamored of Franny and Zooey (to don my hipster cap) and Nine Stories and the craziness of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters with the Tom Collins and the deaf uncle and the terrible, giant paragraphs of Seymour, An Introduction.

I love Salinger’s descriptive passages and his perfectly chosen details. I would rather read Salinger’s description of a chicken sandwich than some other jerk-wad’s impassioned tribute to the Sistine Chapel any day. Salinger was a recluse, a religious flip-flopper and a hotly debated pervert but there is no one, alive or dead, who knew as much about chicken sandwiches and glasses of milk. And don’t get me started on his descriptions of very wet cocktails.

So here, unresearched and unrehearsed, I give you a list of my favorite Salinger moments off the top of my head:

- The scene where Mrs. Glass surveys the bathroom cabinet in Zooey and dumps cigarette ash into the empty wastebasket.

- The passage in The Laughing Man where the narrator says that he has only seen three immediately beautiful women in his life, one of whom threw a lighter at a porpoise from a cruise ship.

- When Franny orders the chicken sandwich at the French restaurant in Franny and Lane thinks about being in the right place with the right-looking girl.

- Anything about Just Before the War with the Eskimos, except when the brother picks food out of his teeth with his fingernail and ruins the romance for me. Another excellent chicken sandwich scene; another great tennis jacket.

- When the whole party comes back to Buddy’s apartment in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Buddy mixes drinks, gets drunk and lies to the deaf uncle.

- The incredible narrative self-indulgence of Seymour, An Introduction. My favorite line: “Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).”

And since I doubt that I can muster up anything worthy of following that line, I guess I’ll close here.