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Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller, �With Love and Squalor�

Started November 26 � Finished November 26, 2002; 194 pages. Posted 27 November 2002

Funny, having just written two entries that were kind of sad, now that I think of it, I�m actually in a good mood. And now I have to talk about the melancholy-ist of the melancholy, Mr. J.D. Salinger.

Actually, I don�t. This book features essays by �14 of Our Best and Brightest Contemporary Writers� responding to the fiction of J.D. Salinger. That�s a bad sign in itself. For Salinger is, with many others as well as myself I�m sure, a very personal thing. I don�t go around screaming about what bananafish means to the modern proletariat, or try to relate Holden Caulfield to myself or anyone else for that matter.

Salinger is to me (although I said I wouldn�t talk about this) personal. And it�s introspective. I don�t think you need to agree with, or even like his characters, but it�s hard to avoid that little smirk that forms at the side of your mouth as you read � the one that says, �Yeah, I get it.� For something like that, I don�t necessarily want it dissected for content and meaning and allegory.

And in another case of synchronicity, at about the same time I reached this conclusion, I had tooken (to use the vernacular of my fellow student population) nearly four hours of my free time to wait around campus solely to watch a professor lecture on Shakespeare�s King Lear � A lecture I didn�t need, and to top it off, a lecture I had already seen before. It was just so amazing that I had to see him do it again.

With that being said, assuming you agree with me, would you want to read other people�s takes on Salinger � what he meant, what he was trying to get across, the meaning of symbolism and imagery? What if I told you that the views expressed were coming from other authors? Doesn�t that make you cringe? There is this stigma that comes with Salinger for other author�s where the venom just piles out. I don�t understand it myself, but I think some of it must come from jealousy.

That�s certainly how most of these authors approach their essays. Nearly half of them say, in effect, �Salinger? Fuck that guy! I used to like him, but I was a dumb kid. Now that I know about his pedophile, urine-drinking past, I�ve grown out of his childish prose. So buy my book if you really want something that�s worth reading.�

Even those who praise him for the effect that he had can�t get around the Salinger myth, and they suffer for the same reasons. They�re just as phoney as the rest of them. They just don�t get it. Worse, I don�t know if I want them to. Ultimately, I know that I�m not going to be the one to try and do it.

And then near the end, something funny happened. A lone author, Amy Sohn, wrote a fiction piece instead of literary criticism following the line of the opening of Franny and Zooey, or more accurately, how her heroine was affected by that story. Instead of picking Salinger apart for trivialities, she had a tribute, or perhaps homage.

And I knew that somebody else got it.


Rating: Worth library prices.

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