Love and squalor

My relationship with literature has not been an academic one, outside of high school English and a couple of laughably ghettoized "humanities" courses at Michigan, taught within the engineering college. I've had some peripheral contact with the academic lit community through friends though, and I've gathered that the now late J.D. Salinger is not generally well regarded there. He's considered juvenile, paternalistic, and that most cutting of academic putdowns, middlebrow.

I can see all that, but I don't really care. It's probably an age thing. When in your teens and early twenties, you tend to look to novels (and definitely to music) as life rafts in a shipwreck. Life is so hard, and finding art that resonates with youthful pain just means so much at that stage that it can hardly be overstated. You're looking for people to tell you how to live. You really feel like the right album or the right book can save you. I'm not alone in remembering in listening to albums over and over as a sixteen year old, devouring how true it all felt, ecstatically grateful to discover that there was meaning out there beyond suburb and high school. Is it that awful that so many teens found something in Holden Caulfield? You probably should think he's kind of a toothache of a person if you're 43. You definitely don't want to live your whole adult life feeling you're too good to live in a world of phonies. But once in awhile it's OK to remember that feeling, and Salinger wrote how it felt better than anyone. If nothing else it will help you remember when it comes time for you to deal with gawky, pained teenagers, all raw nerve endings. Maybe it will stay your impulse to tell them their problems are trivial.

Salinger's faults were real. He doesn't convey the breadth of human experience. His focus was fairly narrow. If the accounts of his children and lovers are to be credited he turned into a weird, unpleasant man after he stopped publishing. I sort of saw what he was going for with the whole Jesus Prayer business in Franny and Zooey, but I didn't really feel it. The whole Glass family business got a little precious. If he's your guide to life and you're older than 23, you're doing life wrong. Etc., etc. I'm glad Salinger existed and wrote though. Mostly what he did he did great. You write better stories than Bananafish or Esme and I'll read them.