On Moderation

Wordwhore and I need a Salinger break. It seemed like a good idea, reading all of it at once. Salinger's a whale of a good writer, of course, and he didn't write all that much, which makes the project emminently do-able. And once we'd done it, we'd have a handy trump card to play the next time some cocktail-party blowhard who skimmed half of Catcher in 10th grade and has the plot muddled up with Dead Poets' Society and A Separate Peace got started on some Bacardi-fueled mental masturbation about Christ-imagery or the effect of the Cold War on American letters or something equally insufferable.

So we read Nine Stories and we read Catcher. And they were, of course, amazing. The precise ear for dialogue -- any of the stories could become a play with almost no changes; if only most playwrights were so good making speech both natural and dramatic -- the consistency of Holden's cheerfully depressed voice, the characters rendered so complete with such quick descriptions of clothes or stance or habits of speech.... It was great.

But it was also a little much, or at least a little fast. The stories, each of which is each compelling and poignant and all that on its own, begin to bleed together when read as quickly and hungrily as we read them. Their endings, which are frankly not their strong points, begin to seem like gongs, or maybe like the inevitable clang of a huge bell put in motion with a yanked rope at the beginning of the story. The suicides and drunken breakdowns cease to suprise, which is why my favorite of the stories was "Down at the Dinghy", the crushed little boy and his mother racing back to, rather than away from, the house which is both the source of the boy's hurt and a haven. (Yes, there is a sorrow in the realization that the hurt will be repeated throughout his life, that his mother may not be the crusading protector we would wish him to have, but the ending leaves them running into the future, not either stuck in the past, wishing they could be stuck in the past, or about to be stuck in this moment forever.)

And then there was the weather. It's summer. It's not the time to hibernate and consider the emptiness of human achievement, the inevitable failures of people (or at least adults) to understand each other; it's time to lie in the sun. It's time to call our friends up and hang out. It's time to talk to the kids on the stoop who are hula-hooping and jumping double-dutch and playing with every dog that comes by, without imagining that they will grow into frustrated, misunderstood, emotionally broken adults.

So. We are taking a break. Wordwhore finally got a subscription to the New Yorker, which should keep her out of trouble, she's swooning over Ren Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, and staying true to our summer pledge to read more fiction with Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, one of only two women (not that I think that's ridiculous or anything) on the New York Times' list of the best American fiction of the past 25 years. I forgot to renew and thus had to return Loren Eisley's The Night Country (I'll get it back, not to worry.), and I just can't quit John McPhee, currently the essays collected in Pieces of The Frame, which are making me believe in the Loch Ness Monster again.