See more glass wrote:
Not An Expert wrote:This, in turn, discouraged me from reading any more Salinger.
Your loss. Although some of his short stories are uneven, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", "Teddy", and especially "For Esme With Love and Squalor" are fantastic.
I loved that bit in "For Esme With Love And Squalour" when Esme says to the narrator:
"You're quite intelligent for an American".
The other brilliant story in that collection (other than the ones you mention) was:
"Just Before The War With The Eskimoos".
Most of those stories are, in a sense, love-letters to his siblings and eulogies of their characters. "Franny and Zooey" are of course longer examples of the same literary device.
Salinger identified more with his siblings than any other individual: shared experiences in childhood have for him a profound shaping of one's identity and childhood love is almost Salinger's definition of happiness. A lot of the critics of Salinger (among them some of those writing on this thread) see Holden as a mere social malcontent and a typical teenage angst-filled rebel. He is much more subtle than that: his disgust for phonies is the reverse side of the coin to his love for the people he identifies with: children, those on the margins of society/victims such as Joan, the nuns and the boy who through himself from a window, and more than anyone else in the novel, his siblings.
Holden's love for D.B., Allie and Phoeboe falls just on the fiction side of a blurred dividing line where fiction and auto-biography meet. Almost all the rest of Salinger's published work falls just the other side of the same line.
I was interested that one poster mentioned Meursault and those infamous opening lines: "Aujoud'hui ma mere est morte. Ou peut-etre hier: je ne sais pas." from The Outsider. While a great book too, I don't know if I much care for the comparison, they are in my mind two very different kinds of strangers and Holden is much more sympathetic.