I haven't read any Salinger books since high school, and I feel like he either took too much or not enough shit depending on who was talking about him. Like everyone else I read The Catcher in the Rye and as a 15 year old the book just plain worked for me- Holden Caulfield really captured that "loss of innocence" we all have as we slowly start making our way into adulthood. I liked it, but I wasn't obsessed with it. Some people look back on this as one of their favorite books, but they always seem to be the type of people who stopped reading anything after college. Other people look back on Catcher as terrible because Holden Caulfield is a whiny shit. He's supposed to be! How can he grow up at the end when there's nothing to grow out of? Anyway this post has become more of a review of Catcher in the Rye than Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour- An Introduction. I'll leave the critique of the former to Trev whenever he gets around to posting it, and concentrate on the latter, which I just read. Frankly, there wasn't much to it. The first novella, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters has nothing to do with carpentry but instead is about the Glass family, a commonly-visited subject for Salinger. In it Buddy Glass is on leave from WWII to see his brother Seymour's wedding, where Seymour is a no-show. Buddy gets stuck in a car with a few strangers who talk about what happened, and the majority of the book is just conversations in the car. Everyone else in the car is especially critical of Seymour, which mostly just pisses Buddy off, delivering more on the themes from Catcher- everyone's a judgmental phony! Anyway Seymour ends up eloping his wife in the end and that's the end of that. Not a great book, but whatever. Seymour- an Introduction, however. Ugh. Much like my old friend Beckett, Salinger goes for stream of conscious style writing, and just like before I have no idea why. It must be easier on an author to let it all out and not have to worry about editing it all down, but it's brutal on readers. And all of that boring writing for what? Exactly what the title says- an introduction to Seymour. Sort of a "here are the important things to know about Seymour." You read about his writing style and love of poetry, what clothes he wears, shit like that. Salinger answers the who, what, where; but skips entirely over the why. Why should I care about Seymour? How is he interesting in any way? He wasn't, so I hated Seymour- an Introduction.July 24, 2011
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour- an Introduction
I haven't read any Salinger books since high school, and I feel like he either took too much or not enough shit depending on who was talking about him. Like everyone else I read The Catcher in the Rye and as a 15 year old the book just plain worked for me- Holden Caulfield really captured that "loss of innocence" we all have as we slowly start making our way into adulthood. I liked it, but I wasn't obsessed with it. Some people look back on this as one of their favorite books, but they always seem to be the type of people who stopped reading anything after college. Other people look back on Catcher as terrible because Holden Caulfield is a whiny shit. He's supposed to be! How can he grow up at the end when there's nothing to grow out of? Anyway this post has become more of a review of Catcher in the Rye than Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour- An Introduction. I'll leave the critique of the former to Trev whenever he gets around to posting it, and concentrate on the latter, which I just read. Frankly, there wasn't much to it. The first novella, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters has nothing to do with carpentry but instead is about the Glass family, a commonly-visited subject for Salinger. In it Buddy Glass is on leave from WWII to see his brother Seymour's wedding, where Seymour is a no-show. Buddy gets stuck in a car with a few strangers who talk about what happened, and the majority of the book is just conversations in the car. Everyone else in the car is especially critical of Seymour, which mostly just pisses Buddy off, delivering more on the themes from Catcher- everyone's a judgmental phony! Anyway Seymour ends up eloping his wife in the end and that's the end of that. Not a great book, but whatever. Seymour- an Introduction, however. Ugh. Much like my old friend Beckett, Salinger goes for stream of conscious style writing, and just like before I have no idea why. It must be easier on an author to let it all out and not have to worry about editing it all down, but it's brutal on readers. And all of that boring writing for what? Exactly what the title says- an introduction to Seymour. Sort of a "here are the important things to know about Seymour." You read about his writing style and love of poetry, what clothes he wears, shit like that. Salinger answers the who, what, where; but skips entirely over the why. Why should I care about Seymour? How is he interesting in any way? He wasn't, so I hated Seymour- an Introduction.
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Yeah. Salinger has four books, it seems, with three of them being compilations of some sort. (One set of nine short stories, one novella short story pair, and one novella "stream of consciousness" pair.) This was my least favorite of those books because although Roof Beam was a decent short story in a vein akin to Catcher's (as you've noted), Seymour was a mess of boring bullshit that never came together to form an even slightly compelling story.
ReplyDelete"Franny" and "Zooey" were at least both decent stories and the "Nine Stories" are all different enough to hold your interest throughout that book. (None are worse than Seymour, and all are around twenty or thirty pages.)
Catcher inspired me to read all of Salinger's other stuff, but nothing ever quite compared. I wish you better luck and appreciation!