Hapworth 16, 1924

This book - well, it was never published as a book, rather as a Very Long Short Story in the New Yorker (the whole text is available from the link above) - by J.D. Salinger - is easily and without a doubt the worst thing he ever had properly published. I really wanted this to be good; you see, it's Buddy Glass copying word-for-word a very long letter his elder brother Seymour (who is, from this at least, though reading this has somewhat soured that, one of my favourite characters in all of fiction) sent from a summer camp in 1924, when Seymour was apparently seven years old.

   It already strains belief. The letter is well over sixty A4 pages long if you copy-paste the text from the link above and fart it into a Word document or similar. However clever or eccentric seven-year-old Seymour was, however injured his leg may have been, I simply do not believe that he would have devoted so much time to a single letter to his mother who he would have seen in a week or two anyway. Realism aside, the tone rankles. Seymour as the author of this letter is very obviously not a child and is very obviously Salinger himself attempting to pre-empt some bizarre precocious fantasy. There are extensive passages where this Literal Child at length objectifies the female camp warden's wife and thinks about what it would be like to pleasure her. Then there's the final forty percent of the letter, which is a "request for reading material" - deeply pedantically specific, unquantifiably esoteric, and of course far too much for even a very clever seven-year-old and his very clever five-year-old brother to get through in a handful of weeks at summer camp, where there are other activities, other children, etc. I really don't know what Salinger was trying to say with this piece. It really has forever soured my impression of the Glass family, who I always had prior found fascinating sources of curiosity as quasi-realistic character studies - but this letter and the portrait of the child supposed to be writing it paints, really just makes me sad. It's like J.D. had no clue what real people were like, were supposed to be like, were supposed to like, were supposed to do, say, write - and he just goes off on this nitrous tangent that's so ridiculous it would be comical if it weren't so long and taking itself so seriously. This letter did not make me laugh or even smile once in its fifty/sixty page length (once I'd copy-pasted it from that website and farted it into a .pdf so I could flip through it on my Kindle); and though Salinger is far from what I would consider a comic writer, everything else I've ever read by him has at least had a certain levity and humour to it that gives the impression that it was written by a human about humans. This doesn't. This is just sad. This is like some grand gesture of literary experiment that nobody asked for because everybody knows they wouldn't like it. And I didn't. Sorry, Seymour Glass. I hope your leg got better after all that - but I hope you got your sad arse out of bed and made friends with some other actual children at that summer camp instead of sitting around pretending that you can read French and Italian and German well enough to interpret those historical texts you requested to a degree that satisfies you. You know, Seymour - when I read this, I thought you were one of the most interesting characters I'd ever come across. But having read this letter to your mother, so devotedly re-typed by your brother Buddy, I feel nothing but sorrow for you. And not in the way that I would even want to comfort you. I can see myself watching you blow your brains out in that hotel room and I would feel nothing but relief that at least you weren't bothering the banana-fish anymore.

   That's almost certainly harsh. But he's not real, he's a character - and for Salinger to create a character of such complexity and mystery and depth in a handful of glimpses, only then to give us an extensive diarrhoea of a letter from this very same character that reveals him merely to be nothing but an imagined caricature of who I can only presume the author wished he had been somewhat like as a child so that he may have come closer to some kind of a spiritual fulfilment - I mean (oh man, don't even get started on Salinger and religion, he was Not to be Trusted with it in the slightest instance) - ugh. Jerome David, can you hear me? Nobody can know everything. Not even someone who did know everything could solve every problem just by knowing how. Calm down. Shut up. And in your grave if nothing else regret having made the New Yorker publish this total embarrassment of a "story". I mean - to have written the four books that you have, and then print this mess, is like performing an otherwise perfect decathlon and then halfway through the final 1000m sharting so badly that you slip over in your own excrement. If you enjoy Salinger's books, do not read this. It isn't one of them in the slightest.

George's Marvellous Medicine

This book by Roald Dahl is a fucking shitshow, let's be honest. So there's a boy called George who lives a pretty happy life on a farm with his family, all of whom he gets along pretty well with, except his Grandma - who is never actually abusive, she can't really be as she's too disabled to leave her chair - but is sometimes a bit harsh to him. Which drives George, one day, when the rest of his family is out, to bungle together every single random chemical ingredient* he can find in the house, blend it up, and replace his Grandma's medicine with this new concoction. It does not go well. Grandma grows to be like forty feet tall or something. George's dad, when he gets back, isn't concerned for his mother-in-law's wellbeing - he's excited about the prospect of this new medicinal invention for farming methods. George tests the medicine on a chicken and a cow and they both also grow to ridiculous sizes. George's dad gets so excited that he starts trying to throw together a patent whereby he can somehow in the future control a farm of oversized livestock - but George runs out of medicine. And can't remember exactly how he made it in the first place. His dad is upset, but optimistic - and prompts George to try again, which the boy does: only for his new concoction to immediately cause Grandma to shrink so much that she literally cannot be seen by the human eye.

   The end. Dark, right? What, you wanted spoiler warnings? Roald Dahl is basically public domain at this point babe, don't come to a blog specifically about books and complain that a post like this spoiled it for you. Anyway. I would recommend this book as a bedtime story for children between threeish and sevenish, as it's incredibly dark and also funny as fuck.

* I will be frank, the chapter where he's deciding what to put into it is hilarious.

Matilda

This book by Roald Dahl is so much of a classic that I'm not even going to devote more than a single sentence to a summary of its plot - as I did with the other Dahl classics that I've read it the last few days. If any blog-followers are curious for this recent diversion in content, I am staying at my parents' house for Christmas and they have a Roald Dahl anthology, and I thought it might be funny to revisit some of my childhood stories for blogging purport. Anyway, if you need a fuller explication of the story of this one than I am offering here, go ask Danny Devito.

   Matilda is the neglected child of a neglectful family who takes her love for books to her impoverished teacher, Ms Honey; albeit under the stern gaze of abusive headmistress Mrs Trunchbull - but eventually discovers she has psychic powers, so she fucks everyone over and makes her own life go as well as she pretty much wants.

   Wow, yeh - that was only one sentence. And I thought it was going to become a bit overlong. But yeh, that's the plot. Like most Dahl stories, yes, this is very dark in places - there is violent and emotional abuse, with both Matilda and Ms Honey and a few other characters being the victims; but it's all okay in the end because little miss bookworm can move things with her mind so she gets to manipulate events to the desired outcome. The more I think about Roald Dahl stories as an adult the less I get what message he was really going for, you know?

The BFG

This book by Roald Dahl is one of the less-dark of most of most of his oeuvre, if I remember rightly, which is odd because it does actually feature (or at least mention) quite a lot of human people being eaten alive.

   Story in a nutshell: an insomniac orphan called Sophie is kidnapped by a giant with big ears and a trumpet, who takes her back to his homeland. Here he introduces himself as the BFG (Big Friendly Giant - even though, he is the least big of all the giants, and the only friendly one of all of them, so none of his nomenclature semantics are particularly helpful overall) and reveals, with much relief to Sophie, that unlike the other giants (who eat humans every night) he is strictly vegetarian - subsisting, it seems, on weird warty cucumber things and a particularly-odd strain of soda that makes you have orgasmic farts with every gulp. Sophie accepts this, and learns to trust the BFG further when he hides her from the other giants - who are in the habit of bullying him. Later on the BFG shows Sophie what he does for a job (why, it is never shown - goodness knows who pays him to do this if anyone); catching dreams in bottles and spitting them through his trumpet into the ears of sleeping humans. Sophie has a brainwave: "if we give the Queen a nightmare about giants coming and eating people, she'll do something about it!" Daft, I know. But this is what happens. This is Roald Dahl man, not... I dunno, Brian Catling. So the BFG takes Sophie to see the Queen of England, they have breakfast (which is a whole chapter, can you believe - not even Tolkien was ever THAT self-indulgent) and she agrees to set the military up to catch the giants next time they come to England to eat people. Surprise, it works, and the giants are captured and thrown into a pit. Basically the end.

   I saw a cartoon of this when I was like six, saw the more recent movie adaptation like four years ago, and I must have read the book (this time included) at least half a dozen times; and I still don't know why it's a popular story. This is pure silly. Your kid might like this. I do not. If I was your kid - I did not.

Ghostmaker

This book is the second book in Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series, and it's a little different to all the rest. Instead of a singular self-contained novel, this contains one big novella at the end (which I won't spoil as it's devastatingly fun) set on Monthax - and then seven or eight shortish stories, each focusing on a particularly interesting character from the regiment. Major Rawne, sniper Larkin, sergeant Varl, colonel Corbec, heavy-weapons operator Bragg, trooper Caffran, regimental mascot & piper Milo, scout-sergeant Mkoll... oh man, I love these feth-heads like they were people I know. Abnett as an author has a horrible habit of sketching people so realistically that you get to anticipate them, empathise wise them, and then see them die in ghastly, unpredictable ways. But more on that as the series progresses.

All My Cats

This book is a partially autobiographical shortish novel, or longish novella, by Czech author Bohumil Hrabal, who, once upon a time, moved into a house in the Bohemian area of Kersko just outside Prague, hoping that he would have peace there in which to write. However he finds the town's wild cat population seeps into his life and thus commences the book's central theme and relationship - that of Hrabal with all the cats that start visiting, then staying in, then breeding in, his Kersko home, despite the regular complaints of his wife "what are we going to do with all these cats!?"

   Of course, what he actually does do with the cats is the meat of the story so I won't spoil it here. But be warned - cat lovers expecting a ride as soft and complacently-cattish as this novel will be sorely disappointed, as Hrabal's cat cabal relatively quickly begins a descent into grim, almost Dostoevskian horror and brutality - look out for the mailbag...

   I'd happily recommend this book to people who enjoy reading about the nature and character of cats, as this book I think feeds into that kind of metanarrative really interestingly. But if you just want a nice story about a man with lots of cats, don't read past the first chapter of this one - this is not that kind of story. It is, however, once you get past the sheer darkness of its core conflict, a deeply funny and thought-provoking story about life, care, responsibility, and "whatever are we going to do with all these cats!?"

Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Castle

Can't find this one online either - I found it slightly waterlogged in a park, it looks like it probably came from a Happy Meal or something. Anyway it's a pretty bog standard Scooby story so I won't spoil the fat old mystery here in case you also find a copy of this riveting pocket-size adventure somewhere in the mad fuzz of our outdoors world.

the Diary of a Killer Cat

This book by Anne Fine (and illustrated excellently by Steve Cox) is a poignant, on-the-nose assessment of ways in which we misunderstand or misinterpret the kindnesses or otherwise our pet cats bestow upon us. Now, as an arguably OTT cat-empath who sees a lot of myself reflected in the being of cats (see also Waldron's Ginger), I found this bright eyed six-day seven-chapter Whodunnit tale extremely entertaining, and this would be an optimal Good Bedtime Week's-worth of Reading to Cat AND dog children* as some kind of litmus test for any pet-getting considerations. I enjoyed it, in any case.

* All other pets, rabbits and rats and such, forbid you introduce them to the flesh of these pages. For it is, this book, only truly for cat-lovers, and lovers of cats alone. Which, and I know this is weird, but even the author isn't.

The Twits

This book by Roald Dahl is a grim, somewhat funny but mostly grim, story about domestic abuse taken to its most horrendous logical conclusion, in a flamboyantly misanthropic married couple who end up more or less killing each other with all their schemes and plots. I mean, the monkeys helped, but spoilers.

The Secret Boat

This book is one of the many, many, many works of Patricia St John that blend Quality Kids' Writing with depth-charged rocket-fuelled evangelically Christian propaganda. I say this not to be derisive - its doctrine is sound, and its storytelling far slicker than other similar efforts - but to a non-Christian reader whose experience of the faith has been less than 100% A-Okay I'm pretty sure it would just come off as disingenuous and twee.
   What St John does do very well is literary diveable portraiture of life as a "third culture kid" and it being an unpredictable impact on these youths; and while much of the decolonization of the Western Christendom mindset that I think is essential to the ongoing successes of a western missionality, the characters draw up workable examples from the story itself - of the Gnosis of Christ, of the beauty of salvation through faith and the humanized power of raw, friendly forgiveness: on these fronts, St John's book makes fantastic uses of living metaphorical touchstones that root the story heavily in Christian ethics and thought, and while it in places does certainly come off as "twee" - it never bonks the reader over the head with strict dogma, and its subtext is as generous as I could have hoped to expect from Christian literature.
   One for the bookshelves if you're a Christian family with children who Read Stuff - especially the secret stuff. Whose boat are you in? Do you own it or is it a rental, borrowing, theft kind of boat? And most importantly do you know how to handle the rudder and mainsails when the waves get choppy?

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

This book is of course the children's classic by Lewis Carroll - & I'm not going to talk here about the literary impacts of nonsense writing, nor the many & myriad cultural spinoffs or references strewn across Western book/screenwriting like flecks of shit out of a hippo's arse aimed across the wasteland of post-Victorian Anglophone normativity, nor even the whole paedophilia question; because this YouTuber has already done a better job talking about these things than I could be bothered to do.

   One thing I will talk about instead is that recently, and I forget the context exactly of how or why or if this revelation was prompted, but smack-bang in the middle of my inner angstful dithering over whether & when to come out as non-binary, my dad told me that had I been born without my Y chromosome my name would've been Alice - and this was - a lot, as discerning empathic readers will probably long have realised that I've been well on my way down a variety of rabbit-holes anyway and my life is even to me somewhat topsy-turvy nonsensical at the best of times.

   I can't think of an appropriate segue for this but I'm mentioning it anyway - I've been fired.* Yes, from my dream job that I was really quite good at and had foreseen as being as close to a lifelong fruitful career as someone like me was likely to find - without moving to London, which is still very much fuck that. I don't know what the next chapter is apart from it definitely entails moving out of my flat that I can't afford anymore. I can't say however that I don't know why this happened. It happened because my mental health has been All Over the Damn Place recently and I've been too irregularly unreliably missing days at work given this, and have consistently failed to develop means of communicating with the rest of my team in mitigating any inconveniences this causes to our work. I got my first formal disciplinary warning less than a month ago, and my head being where it is at the moment, I think part of me just went "okay this is happening, fuck it" and I've got the second and third-final within an impressively neat time-frame.** It sucks. I will miss that job, that whole office, like anything, and I really hope that in time God will help me to work through my shit enough to even get a handle on why it all happened the way it did. But for now, I can only press onwards, through the mystical horrible wonderland that is my life, in the hope that things will get - if not easier or better - then at least clearer.

* I mean, not like right now, I'm on holiday with my family at the moment. But last week.

** As I don't want to run any sort of risk of people thinking I'm bitter or trying to slate the Church Army folks or their HR personnel here, let me state that they've handled things with incredible patience, generous kindness and proper formality.
   The first warning only came in after the problems kept manifesting when they'd already given me several sessions of counselling, which weren't much help, and repeatedly asking me what if anything they could do to help my situation, which I could only say I didn't know, as I don't. Tim, Faye, Mark, Des, Andy, Neil - you have my utmost apologies, thanks, and sincerest reassurance that I hold nothing against anyone and you made the right call. If I wasn't as mental as I obviously must be I'd have fired me too.

the Little Prince

This book, apparently* an incredibly-widely-loved classic by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - is one I didn't really know what to expect from other than probably a child-friendly tale with a vaguely uplifting message. It was exactly that, in the purest and most gorgeous form I've read in a long time - it is clear why this book is so massively beloved. It's about a pilot who has crash-landed in the Sahara Desert, and while trying to fix his engine, makes friends with a little dude who claims to be the prince from a really small planet far away. The prince asks questions, induces a roaring campfire of penetrative conversation about what really matters in life (clue: what is beautiful), and tells the pilot stories of some of the other tiny planets he's visited out there, and the somewhat-zany yet profound and poignant characters who live on them - and of course, he tells of how he came to Earth, and found it so much larger and emptier and lonelier than these other planets, but eventually settles upon learning things that help him appreciate timeless truth and beauty wherever he is. It is a story about uniqueness, about enjoying - nay, loving - life to the full, about the rampant absurdities that grown-ups, irrationally and inexorably, force upon themselves and children much to the efficient collective productivity of society at large but at the real cost of hampering our childlike ways of thinking about things that can truly make them still seem magic, unique, beautiful, wild and free. I don't know. It's pretty flipping magical. Tears may well up. Also it's got lovely simple little illustrations by the author. That's all I can be bothered to write as it's late and I've just read this in one sitting and I have to get up early to go to the library tomorrow** to continue speed-reading loads of political theory and stuff and while I do love my subject it's never as magical reading non-fiction as something like this. If you know anyone under the age of thirteen buy them a copy of this and read it to them because childhood is magical and grown-ups are pretty good at making the world suck - and the general thrust of this book's core message, I think, treads a pretty good line at compromise-guiding how we can emerge into the real grown-up world without losing our sense of wonder at the sheer unfettered majesty of life itself and all that is beautiful.

* Have a look at Wikipedia's list of best-selling books; this was the only place I'd ever heard of it before. It's apparently super popular in continental Europe, and we English-speakers just tend not to get as excited about things that have to have been translated. Like, I didn't even ever particularly intend to acquire or read this - a German family who have been staying at my parents' house left it to us and I saw it on the arm of the sofa and thought 'hey, if I remember rightly, that's on the Wikipedia list of worldwide all-time best-selling books, and it's pretty short, why not?' ~ and am glad I did.

** Well okay, today.***

*** Happy 4th of July, if you're American, or just anyone else who may care.

the Old Man and the Sea

This book by Ernest Hemingway is an indisputable masterpiece.* This was the third time I'd read it, and the second time I've read it in a single sitting (it's very short). Before I talk about the book I'd like to mention the actual physical copy - because (not wanting to rub it in if you end up tracking down a bog-standard modern reprint paperback) mine is beautiful; it's a pocketsize hardback from 1966, with faintly yellow-browned pages that smell of sitting on a beanbag in a sunlit attic with a full teapot and nothing to do but enjoy a good book, and a dust jacket with an excitingly expressionistic colourful painted illustration of a big fish on the front and a man in a small boat on the back. It was a Christmas present from my brother a few years ago, so cheers Seth.

   Anyway, the book (this next paragraph will contain plot spoilers, but the true worth of the book is poetic rather than 'oh wow That Happened' so decide for yourself if that matters).

   It is, very simply, about an elderly Cuban fisherman. He has not caught a fish for eighty-four days, and a young boy who he sometimes fishes with is concerned for him. One the eighty-fifth day, he sails out, and ends up hooking a big fish - too big to pull up, so he leaves it hooked and lets it pull his boat far away over the sea hoping it will tire itself out, which eventually it does, rising to the surface to reveal itself as a magnificent marlin, the biggest he has ever seen (and he's seen a lot - this is one experienced fisherman, as the narration shows). So when the opportunity arises, he harpoons it, and straps it to the side of his boat because it's too big to fit inside. But then, during the journey back to land, what should happen but sharks (flipping sharks!) eat his entire fish. By the time he hits the beach, exhausted from the three days spent with little food and water sat under the baking tropical sun clutching with desperate hunterly vigour onto a fishing line, there is nothing strapped to his boat but a tooth-scratched backbone with an enormous nose-sworded skull attached to one end and a giant crescent-moon tailfin to the other. The boy is distraught but proud, the other fishermen are cowed with respect and sympathy, and the old man, knackered and feeling both victorious and defeated, goes to sleep. That's it - I told you plot wasn't the main point.

   Hemingway's prose aches with a purity, a simplicity and elegance, that lends to this straightforward little story a depth and grandeur that puts the reader right there in the scene; man and boy and sea and fish all observed, described, but remaining something of an enigma, known truly only to themselves, even when memories of the man's earlier adventures are recalled in narration, these help provide insight into some of what he thinks he is but we are kept outsiders to him, seeing him chiefly through his actions, which are mostly about being a really good fisherman. He is precise, efficient, attentive, strong, patient, resourceful, and persistent, and in him we see reflected the height of human capability in using ones faculties to conquer the natural world for our own needs; in this case, a fish. But unlike another (much longer) story about a rivalry between man and sea creature in which man's pride and sea creature's ambivalence rendered the whole affair meaningless and tragic, it is clear that Hemingway's old man has a deeply profound respect for the fish (even calling it 'brother' at one point), which may not make moral sense to any vegetarian readers but lends his conversations with himself amid the narration of his fishing trip an air of ecological consciousness - this man sees and takes in the splendour of the natural world surrounding him, only conquering what he must to eat and sell. His reaction when the sharks rob him of his catch is (after doing all he can to fend them off, in improbable-badass-fashion killing several of them with a knife tied to an oar) one of resignation - an 'oh well, I didn't really deserve him, I cheated by using human trickery like fishing equipment, so it's only fair enough that sharks cheat me back'. It's a cyclical story then, and though it has elements of tragedy the attitude the man seems to carry throughout is one of profound acceptance of the unpredictability of nature and yet our dependence on it - and this robs it of being ultimately tragic, as the old man has had such a long life with many adventures that he is happily able to eke out a simple existence doing what he does best and taking humble pride in it.

   But really I don't think it's so much a story about human relationships with nature as it is a story about being a Good Man (in Hemingway's eyes); the old man's lifestyle and mindset are completely cohesive, and though he is past his prime he is still an excellent practitioner of a trade that blends the practical-primal peaks of everyday human endeavours well - good enough to catch the largest fish Havana had ever seen, but not good enough to save it from sharks; and therein lies the rub, try as he might, man will never conquer nature's indifference, and accepting this, knowing where we truly sit in the world and accepting it with stoic graceful willpower, is the kernel of energy that keeps the old man keen in his respect for nature even as he strives to defeat individual fish. Similar parallels about this sense of perspective being an importance mediating force in men's mindsets to pure masculine activities are revealed in conversations the old man and the boy have about baseball - the stardom of Joe DiMaggio is puzzled over when they read in the newspaper that he has a bone spur in his heel, and the old man wonders (when his hand cramps up after a day of being towed by the fish) whether Joe's minor pain would be a comparable hindrance in his field, or whether he'd just man up and get on with it and hit a home run. Basically the Hemingwayan view of masculinity is one of direct simplicity and purpose, strength of body, of mind, skill and will, but one that knows its place and its limits - chief among which is the sheer indifference of much of the world around us, including the natural world, to us. What do real men do faced with that? They persist.

   Enough of my eco-feminist ramblings. This is a really good book and nowhere near as thematically convoluted as I've probably made it sound. It is a book about nothing necessarily more than an old man catching a fish, and yet there are unfathomable oceanic depths to its simplicity. It is one of the most perfectly executed long short stories (or maybe short novels) to grace the many stacks of my bookshelf, and you'd probably like it.

* He won a Nobel Prize in Literature for it, which is kind of as indisputable as masterpieces get.

Albert Blows a Fuse

This book (sorry if the link's dodgy, this proved to be a hard one to track down online) was one that I read at least a dozen times as a child, lost (I think it was left behind when we moved to Sheffield when I was eight), didn't miss very much, but remembered fondly enough to buy the second-hand copy I found in a charity shop's bargain bin last week without a moment's hesitation. It's written by Tom Bower, also the vibrant illustrations by him are what brought this book to life to my younger self; neat-looking characters in busy colourful spreads - they're fun pictures.

   I'm gonna tell you the whole plot because I quite like it and you're unlikely ever to read it. The book's about a simple old man called Albert, who likes gardening and listening to the radio with his cat, but one day, his radio's fuse blows. Unable to find another one in the shop, he is coerced into buying a TV - and he becomes addicted to the glow of the small screen. He drinks in entertainment-based consumerism, rampantly buying more and more TVs and aerials and satellite dishes so he can get more channels and more entertainment, even selling his previously-beloved garden to fund his descent into couch-potatodom, of which he hits rock bottom when he moved a fridge and microwave into his television-room. At the book's low point, he has a wall of televisions blocking out the sun, and he just slouches there, watching/eating/sleeping/repeating. But then lo, he awakes one day and a bird has somehow flown into his room. It presents him with a flower, reminding him of his lost garden and his love for what had been his normal life, and then it starts pecking at his remote controllers, turning off each and every screen. Albert rushes downstairs, and with the neighbours' (his garden's now owners) help, tears down the fence and agrees to now share it with them, which they do, for the happy-ever-after of the book. The dozens of defunct television sets become reused as plantpots.

   It's a blatant cautionary tale, one that was needed when it was published in 1991, and one that's definitely needed in our current Netflix-age. Entertainment addiction, capitalist-driven materialism, the loneliness epidemic - these are all serious and densely-interconnected issues. Our culture is being moulded, twisted, by economic forces pushing distraction above mindfulness, isolation above community, endless acquisition for personal gain above contentment with enough for sharing. Exactly how these processes occur is far beyond the scope of a children's book (or for that matter for my blog post about aforementioned book) to explain fully, but the powerful gist of Albert's story, which I think had a somewhat underhandedly-profound influence on me as a kid, is that the solution to these problems comes down to the individual. Maybe our circumstances do drive us to loneliness, to laziness, to a passive screen-watching existence that barely resembles personhood. But we can choose to turn off the screen, to go outside, to start being productive and sociable again. And rightly. Maybe Albert needed an enigmatic bird to prod him in this direction, but we would hope that children, having read this, would learn to recognise with disgust when their lifestyles are veering too far toward that depicted but that which sadly resembles a great many people nowadays (including, I'll admit so as to avoid hypocrisy, myself at times). So, it's a very good cautionary tale and is also quite an entertaining read for children (assuming they're like me when I read it as a kid, cos I enjoyed it). Worth getting instead of another cartoon boxset for your attention-spanless nephew's next birthday, though you might be wasting your money. Cautionary tales, I find, seldom work on those who have already fallen off whatever cliff the book warns them about. Do kids even read nowadays?

Franny & Zooey

This book, the third by Jerome David Salinger to grace the pages of this blog and, no less, upon my third reading of it, is comprised of a long short story and a short novella that together explore a messy emotional incident that occurred, and was more or less resolved, between the two youngest siblings of the Glass family. Of Salinger's four books, it is I think the most spiritual in theme and content, if not in tone (though all of his works are somewhat spiritual in tone). In this post I would like to start sheafing through the hundreds of scribbled pages of mental notes that I've accrued over years of loving Salinger's writings, and organise them into a rough explanation of what I think makes his work so special, so unique, and how it can help its reader grow. I'm doing this in this post because I've already done a Salingeresque bleeding-heart post on the other Glass family novella-pair, and a cursory reviewer's overview of his collection of shorts, so I'll take this one to be my punchy, philosophical, hopefully insightful, tremendously precocious attempt at some literary insight, at least of how I've read him. Astute readers will note that I have not yet reread Salinger's most famous work and only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, but rest assured I will do soon (it's currently under my pillow with a bookmark nestled just inside the front cover, waiting). Seeing as his novel is more self-contained than these other three works, I'll here discuss how Franny & Zooey, as well as the other two, help us build up a framework in which to understand the driving motors, the soul, of Salinger's writing, which I feel manifests itself more tangibly in the other works - but understanding which is the key to properly getting any of them, including his novel, which works well as a stand-alone, but seen in the context of the worldview revealed by his others is an almost incomparably brilliant book.

   Note - if you're sketchy on the following point you'll probably have stopped reading already, but please bear in mind that I am not a scholar of literature by any measure. The following analysis is that of a purebred amateur (I haven't even read the Sparknotes for it, though to do so would be thoroughly against the spirit of the Glass family so who cares), and so please, dear reader, take no shame or pride in disagreeing, but I hope you find my thoughts on the matter at least interesting, as I feel that thinking them through has thoroughly deepened my appreciation of Salinger's books, and has thus also built character; and it may also do for others. But before I dive into self-indulgent theory I shall fulfil the chief obligation of this blog: to summarise the book and recommend it.

   There is first a long short story, called Franny, concerning a terrible date that Franny Glass, the youngest of the Glass siblings, has with her boyfriend Lane Coutell on a short return from college. She despairs at his ambitious student-like normalcy, rants against egoism and pretense, shrugs off any proper conversation and neglects to eat throughout their lunch date. The only thing that seems to perk her back into life is talking about a book that she's been obsessively reading, called The Way of a Pilgrim, about a Russian peasant who tries to learn a mystical method of prayer, and then travels, humbly sharing it with others. Lane doesn't pick up on the fact that this is the only thing his clearly damaged girlfriend is currently able to find any genuine interest in at all, and he doesn't listen to her explanation. She has a nervous breakdown in the bathroom and later faints.
   There is secondly a short novella, called Zooey, concerning the attempts of the second-youngest Glass sibling, Zooey, and their mother Bessie, to rouse Franny from some kind of emotional crisis that she's fallen into on the family sofa. He is depicted first bantering at his mother harshly from a bathtub, later neatening up to go to a meeting to discuss a poorish script he's been talked into acting in. Before leaving the apartment, he drops into the lounge, and talks to Franny at length about her predicament, angering and upsetting her considerably with his incisive tactless analysis of why she feels the way she does. After a couple of other fruitless tactics (pretending to be one of her other brothers by disguising his voice over the phone, dredging up many a memory of previous philosophy-induced breakdowns within the enigmatic precocious Glass family, briefly even attempting a vaudeville performance), he finally launches into an inspiring finale about the nature of faith and joy and the objects of these two phenomena, and though he delivers this with a rather blasé academic bent, it does seem to work in fixing his sister's mind.
   Summarising a Salinger text is more or less completely pointless. These are two of the most human, most thought-provoking, most honest, rambling yet blunt, raw yet verbose, sad and hilarious and weirdly engaging, pieces of writing that you will ever read. If you have a brain and a heart and a pair of eyes, please, I urge you, read these, as well as the other books.
   Well, now; what makes Salinger's books special? What is it about these works of literature that so imbues them with unique soul and personality, so able to perfectly bridge the gap between the mundane and the ripely spiritual?
   Disillusionment is the core theme, following two main threads. Firstly, an ideal for human relationships: sincere, mutual, trusting, spontaneous, positive, and fundamentally functional. We see this interpersonal approach embodied in classically Salingeresque characters; who are almost always sentimental and needy. The sad reality of our broken world means that this ideal model of relationships struggles, never quite clicks into place, and so in encounters, dark and mundane, with the egoism and pretense that taints social life with 'phoniness', these characters become alienated and cynical. Children feature heavily in Salinger's writings because they can be presented and understood as of an age whereby they haven't yet outgrown naivety and innocence: they much more naturally emulate this ideal.
   The second thread through which we encounter disillusionment is harder to pin down: an ideal for all value-laden pursuits that comprise a individual human life, seeking truth and beauty, striving for perfection, expressed most commonly through art and religion. Alongside the wounded childlike cynics mentioned above, Salinger's larger characters are often aesthetes or mystics of some kind; striving to capture, or even merely glimpse, absolute values that they know to exist. However, as with those trying to live in social harmony, those trying to acquaint themselves with perfection are far from indefatigable. Pretense and egoism pervade and spoil these spheres too, clouding the purity of the characters' pursuit, leading to further disenchantment.
   Evidence of both these prongs is evident in all of Salinger's notable characters. Holden Caulfield and Buddy Glass, his two most significant narrators, seem to embody a relatively neutral middle-ground between them, Holden veering more toward the former type of disillusionment and Buddy the latter, but ultimately not too burdened by these weights as we rely on them as narrators more to be apt describers of human character, which they are, in ways that do go on anyway to reveal much about these themes. Seymour, as he is presented, seems to me to completely capture the full tragic depth of both prongs. Franny and Zooey, both child-celebrity intellectuals struggling under the weight of their older brothers' ridiculous schemes of philosophical education, have both been dragged by the former into a deep antisociality, and pushed by the latter into a state of angst (which Zooey has come to terms with, and his helping Franny come to terms with it too is the main plot thread of Zooey). Non-Glass family characters bear much of these marks too: just flip through the short stories. Eloise, Selena's brother Franklin, the Chief, Jean de Daumier-Smith, Teddy - in varying states of joy and sorrow, these characters' lives stem from these twin motors that drive Salinger's works.
   His strong spiritual themes are present because of religion's capacity to underpin, justify and obligate these kinds of perfection and value that his characters crave; similarly his occasional sardonic references to psychoanalysis as a 'cure-all' for characters' problems shows a faith that rather than having to scientifically or therapeutically restructure our minds we can overcome these forms of alienation to some extent by collectively deciding to be nicer; his frequent use of unusual but fairly mundane social situations likewise demonstrates the all-invasive lack of these perfections in human life and thought. So his overall tone comes across as cynical; we know of truth and beauty and yet it is never quite here, as in reality, the world often does just suck. This disappointment runs deep and J.D. knows it. This is why his work has such an endearing quality to those who stick with it and listen to it: humans are seekers, we feel our existential absurdity and it stings, and this deep-cutting fact has massive implications for our character, behaviour, the way we converse and conduct relationships; and his unmatched eye for minute quirks enable him to capture and draw out these implications in scenes that come across as real with characters who seem neurotic and insecure enough to be like genuine people, just as self-conflicted, just as happy and sad at the same time. The brilliance of Salinger is that he connects the universal wont of humankind - as sketched out above - into the details of unique personality and circumstance. He does so gently but never open-handedly, in a complex but not obtuse manner, and the result is writing that clicks on a fundamental level with what it's like to be a person.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: an Introduction

This book, a pair of novella-length pieces (the fictitousness of which are just as dubious as their genre) by J.D. Salinger, is, though I am not in the habit of naming favourites, probably close to one of my preferred books of all time. This was the fifth time I've read it. In tribute to Salinger's dedication of the book to [any] "amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs", and the general soul of the book itself, this post shall be especially lengthy, incoherent, verbose, and almost certainly more meaningful to me than you. How did I come across this book? Well, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a half-intelligent middle-class white male westerner post-1960 will, in the height of his teenage years, read The Catcher in the Rye, and I was no different. Needless to say, it filled me with depressive angst, yet I found Holden Caulfield so compelling a voice that I promptly sought out and read every other book that J.D. Salinger ever wrote (there were only three others, so this only took about a fortnight), and I found that these other books were, though in a similar vein, much more positive, life-affirming, generally excellent. This one most of all.

   Both are written in the voice of Buddy Glass, a quasi-fictional man whose outlooks and present circumstances bear marked similarities to the life of the actual author while he was writing (pronounced resemblances include a deep fascination with oriental philosophy and poetry, a world-weary hunger for sincerity and innocence and a despair in other people's failing to feed that need, and the author's/narrator's living as a recluse in the New York woods), though with familial and background details embellished somewhat so as to provide sufficient texture to write extensively of oneself without betraying many real facts thereof. This background includes the large erratic colourful Glass family, central among which (in these pieces of writing at least) is Buddy's elder brother Seymour, a character whom I am about as much in love with as it is possible for a heterosexual male to be enamoured with a fictional man. Though we do not actually physically meet Seymour in these works, through Buddy we are shown his spirit, we are pulled by the crook of the neck into the intimate incommunicable aspects of their brotherhood and told to drink in every speck of what the words can tell us and still know that those words can never tell us enough. The Glass family may be fictional but these are two of the most arrestingly honest pieces of writing you will ever read; and despite their apparent disparity in topic, style and measure, they complement each other perfectly if you lean into the heart of Buddy's memories of Seymour, as that is what they are both chiefly about. More specifically though? I suppose you deserve rough outlines, given that this blog is about the books I've read and not the non-existent poetic brothers I wish I knew.

   Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is a novella-length anecdote about Seymour's 1942 wedding to a woman called Muriel Fedder. It being the war and most of Buddy's family being inordinately scattered across various American entertainment-industry professions, he is told by his sister that he must attend, as he is the only immediate Glass relative available to do so. He does so, still hindered by the pleurisy that has left him on medical leave from the Army, reaches New York and sits through a service only to be caught up in the mass irritated confusion of a crowd of well-dressed strangers when it is realised that Seymour has bailed. Buddy and a small motley entourage (including the matron of honour and her husband, an obscure aunt named Helen Silsburn, and a short deaf-mute man in a top-hat who in his indefatigable silly sparkle is one of the story's highlights) are held up in a wedding car by a parade, and he suggests his nearby apartment as a rest-stop. Though mild resentment turns his way upon their learning his blood-relation to Muriel's scarpered almost-spouse, they comply. After reaching the apartment, Buddy finds himself further pressed into defending Seymour's character, and slips away to avoid awkward questions by offering to make drinks, necking accidentally-too-much scotch himself before he does so, and then chancing upon Seymour's diary. Fearing one of the spurned bride's friends finding it, he takes it into the bathroom and reads several of his enigmatic brother's recent entries (these are also a highlight - Seymour's voice is similar to Buddy's in tone but so much wiser, full of good sadness and jilted purity), before, really quite drunk, he finally remembers to make and serve drinks to his guests. The matron of honour has managed to phone ahead to the main party, and discovered that Seymour showed up secretly after all and has eloped with a surprised Muriel. Buddy, past all caring, sees them out and falls inebriatedly asleep on the sofa.

   Seymour: an Introduction is of similar length, but what kind of piece of writing it actually is I find hard to explain. Sort of potted character description (by Buddy of Seymour) though with extreme reluctance; sort of elucidation on what it means to be creative or wise or good; sort of discourse on the connections forged by interpersonal relationships and written words, the value and yet the insufficiency of reading or writing or being or knowing; sort of compilation of anecdotes from the Glass family's unusual past; sort of extended complaint about being an honest writer with a properly attuned aesthetic sense in a culture where literature is increasingly becoming overwhelmed by the simple, the easy, the cheap, the fake; sort of autobiographical truth-mingled-with-untruth (Buddy refers to other stories by J.D. Salinger that "he" has written); sort of sad and sort of joyous; both mournful and delightful in reminiscence and completely committed to lacking full clarity. It weaves and bobs and floats its linguistic form in a way that is conversational, frank, unpretentious; incredibly easy to read and in a way quite unlike anything else by anyone else. It is probably one of the best pieces of writing I know; it is, even on fifth reading, one of the only ones that can so fully flood my mind that no semi-conscious distraction can possibly meander its way into the foreground of my concentration, heart clenched all the while.

   Together these two short diamonds of the English word blur the lines between fact and fiction, between written and spoken, between personhood and characterhood, between memory and story, between anecdote and essay, in ways that would be extraordinarily complex to describe were I a literature student. Fortunately I am not one; the work is thrown lovingly into the arms of those who will take truths and enjoy goodnesses (be they in books or persons) as they come, and from this book I well-received much just so. It is not written to blur lines, that's just a happy fact of what happens when one writes as honestly as Salinger does.

   I will stop myself here. The virtues of this book far surpass what I could encompass in a blog post, much as those of Seymour are untrapped yet glorified by Buddy's efforts. Let me not begin to exorcise angels.
   I love this book immensely, almost too much even to recommend anyone else read it, as the fear that you won't be struck similarly weighs too heavily upon me - but if you do happen to encounter this book, treat it well. Think while you read, not intellectually but interpersonally, this is not a test, it is an introduction. Don't be clever, be friendly - and if that's an attitude you find it hard to muster as a reader, leave this book well alone, as you don't deserve it.