Still Pondering Salinger

Today the Times ponders J.D. Salinger on his 90th birthday. You know Jerome, don't you? He had an explosive success with Catcher in the Rye in 1951, went on to write extensively about the Glass Family (notably Seymour) and then became a recluse. He's been up in New Hampshire hiding away doing who knows what for the last 30 years.

The Times ponders the longstanding mystery, paying particular attention to the Glass family chronicles for a hint of what he's been thinking about.

In general what has dated most in Mr. Salinger’s writing is not the prose — much of the dialogue, in the stories especially and in the second half of “Franny and Zooey,” still seems brilliant and fresh — but the ideas. Mr. Salinger’s fixation on the difference between “phoniness,” as Holden Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, ’50s feeling about it. It’s no longer news, and probably never was.

This is the theme, though, that comes increasingly to dominate the Glass chronicles: the unsolvable problem of ego and self-consciousness, of how to lead a spiritual life in a vulgar, material society. The very thing that makes the Glasses, and Seymour especially, so appealing to Mr. Salinger — that they’re too sensitive and exceptional for this world — is also what came to make them irritating to so many readers.

Another way to pose the Glass problem is: How do you make art for an audience, or a critical establishment, too crass to understand it? This is the issue that caused Seymour to give up, presumably, and one is tempted to say it’s what soured Mr. Salinger on wanting to see anything else in print.

Still Paging Mr. Salinger - New York Times