i have an odd relationship to this book. a push/pull between feeling ambivalent toward the characters and the style of the narrative while simultaneously being drawn through the story by some intangible force.
my investment in a book's characters is usually the primary force that propels me through a piece and its style of prose, the secondary consideration, but this work had neither really. i mean, j.d. salinger certainly has a singular style, and a prolix vocabulary not to mention a list of literary and religious allusions he refers to left and right.
the description given by the narrator of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom where a substantial portion of the book takes place:
she went over to the medicine cabinet. it was stationed above the washbowl, against the wall. she opened its mirror-faced door and surveyed the congested shelves with the eye--or, rather, the masterly squint--of a dedicated medicine-cabinet gardener. before her in overly luxuriant rows, was a host, so to speak, of golden pharmaceuticals, plus a few technically less indigenous whatnots.
okay so far, right?
but then he continues on to list 42+ items actually inside the medicine cabinet:
the shelves bore iodine, mercurochrome, vitamin capsules, dental floss, aspirin, anacin, bufferin, argyrol, musterole, ex-lax, milk of magnesia, sal hepatica, aspergum, two gillette raors, on schick injecctor razor, two tubes of shaving cream, a bent and somewhat torn snapshot of a fat black-and-white cat asleep on a porch railing, three combs, two hair brushes, a bottle of wildroot hair ointment, a bottle of fitch dandruff remover...
you get the point.
but it's not that i find this completely off-putting or i find salinger a bad writer, it's just that it is not emotionally compelling and never at any point did i feel myself truly connected or even empathetic towards the characters. i wouldn't recognize them on the street if i passed them. i wouldn't call them friends. i wouldn't presume to know what's going on in their heads.
but.
despite this lack {and i say lack here only because this is often the source of the most enjoyment} i found myself unable to put the book down. even at eyelid-drooping 1am after a long day i would tell myself just finish the page and then suddenly catch myself halfway through the next. and the next and then the next. and this didn't just happen once, but repeatedly.
and there were some gems like the passage i wrote about a few weeks {?} ago and:
i'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
and finally the last three pages which i won't quote here and spoil for everyone. but they suddenly gave value to all i had just slugged my way through and drew me in enough to make me want to go back and read it all again. in a new light. with the gentleness i find myself infused with. and finally i really cared about the characters too.
so, after all that, well done j.d.
2 comments:
That's interesting, that last quote. I haven't read the book so I don't know the context, but have been thinking along similar lines, in so far as I feel like the branding of ourselves that we're all doing, on the internet especially but then it seeps into every day life, makes it quite scary to go unnoticed. There was an article in the Times about how total privacy, like, no online identity or twits or photos in the public domain or anything like that, will become the luxury of the hedonistically rich, like tending a private garden in the middle of the city. Very elitist, very precious. I know I could never retreat like that, but it's strange how it's become some sort of fantasy for a lot of people, for me.
that's a fascinating idea. the book takes place in the 60's (hmm....right? i know the narrator mentions the 50's a lot, but i'm pretty sure it's the 60's) and in this, there is something we can definitely relate to in our technology and celebrity ridden culture. i wonder about the sensationalism around octo-mom or even sarah palin and see this is as a symptom of this fear that we have as a culture. i hadn't thought to far ahead to what the other camp might be doing and heading, but i liked the quote a lot because the character is/was an actor and she stepped out of her pursuit of the art disgusted by the ego everyone displayed like fine china on the wall. it somehow rang so true with a lot of my own fears that come and go depending on how grounded and confident {or not} i am feeling at the time.
anyway, my mind is running off here, but i hope this fleshes out where i was coming from, and leads back in a circle to the idea you introduced. i'm rushing off to a bus or else i would try to make that connection more coherent....love, n. :}
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