Pretension & Cleverness: Who is Salinger?

What to make of myself? I finished a Doctor Who novel (The Dalek Generation). It frustrated me as pretentious & self-impressed. The story didn't breathe as much as live on life support. Steady on, with a few scattered memories & references to story lines past in the series. Honestly, I have been disappointed in the quality of the television series as well.  Smith is as brilliant & entertaining as ever in delivering his snappy lines. Also, he demonstrates an effective range of expressions.

I closed the cover to that novel unsatisfied & irritated by the story, as I figured out the key plot twist early.

On the way home from the road trip, my family was caught in a two hour traffic jam on the highway. I opened "Raise high the roof carpenters." By J.D. Salinger. There is hardly a better setting for the appreciation & identification with the story. The weather was humid as in the short story, & I sweat along with the uncomfortable intellectual Buddy Glass. He was stuck in a car with attendees to the stand-up wedding of his older brother, Seymour. His brother is something of a hallowed figure to Buddy, & that Seymour left his fiancée cold at the altar is a matter of exceptionally bad manners in the estimation of Buddy's fellow passengers.  Buddy has been the narrator of other accounts involving the Glass family. Salinger bestows a conceited version of humanity to Buddy. Mr. Glass's narration is sidetracked frequently by pedantic rants & crowing philosophically apologetic defense of his older brother's habits in context. Seymour was a frustrating person with which to live, but his mystic proclamations were religiously read with the fervor reserved for a modern day poetic prophet. I so want to be the amateur reader to whom Salinger dedicated the twin stories. The novel has such beautifully thought-provoking phrases & sentiments. In the second story "Seymour: An introduction," Buddy attempts to paint a portrait of his suicide-suffered older brother. But the contents feel more like a framework. It is difficult to reduce the whole of a person to words. But Buddy doesn't reach the details of the person, only circuitous impressions of the soulfulness & impact of Seymour. The short Tao anecdote about the horse evaluator in the first story's beginning provides a tentative lens through which to understand Buddy's perception of Seymour. Seymour is the Indian elephant in the room of the Glass family. His life & death affected them to various degrees. The personness of Seymour is known only through the secondhand accounts of Buddy & slightly through the second youngest, Zooey,'s short story. Buddy is the foremost prophet for Seymour though. In his position as an unmarried English professor for a small women's college in New York, he has plenty of time on the side to muse on his older brother & write letters to his family. Even Buddy's theme of happiness in the account of Seymour's introduction is conditioned as distinctly unencumbered from any particular emotion: joy or otherwise. The Glass family suffers from over-intelligence, hardly anyone is at their level of intellect to offer a counterpart to their conversations. They are either eccentrically mad or unnaturally sane. Depending on their moodiness, they oscillate betwixt the two.

Earlier, I said I've tried to be a casual reader. But reading this material awakens my mind to try to fathom the depths & nuances of the characters. Buddy alternately frustrates & fascinates me as a reader. While he pontificates on points of taste & curious ideas, the digressions skew the intended focus of his writing. He talks about nearly everything except what was to be his main subject. But the views from this winding path reveal angles & views of the scenery of Seymour as a brother, friend, poet, mystic, prodigy, intellectual, abstractly sentimental, & yet all too human Seymour.