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No More Red Carpets for J.D. Salinger

Posted in Whathaveyou on January 28th, 2010 by JJ Koczan

Not much for obits, but let’s give this a shot:

Yes, we all rejoiced seeing him stroll down the lane each year at the Academy Awards, the Grammys and sometimes even those pesky Golden Globes, but alas, author J.D. Salinger, who so loved the limelight, is dead today at 91. Much like after the 2009 passing of Michael Jackson, his fans have lined the streets of Los Angeles in poorly-printed bootleg t-shirts bearing his image, and there seems to be no end to the public grieving in sight.

In all seriousness, I’ll say this for the guy: J.D. Salinger totally hated your guts. He didn’t even know you. In fact, in all likelihood he hated you before you were born, and he hated your parents too. And he meant it. A genuine American misanthrope in the 20th Century; the age of ever-increasing access and he wouldn’t have it. I guess that’s admirable. Much as anything, anyhow.

And where would we all have been without his most famous work, 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye, to validate all our directionless teenage angst and ennui? To tell us who “the phonies” were and who were the real people? Certainly we were all made real by Holden Caulfield, and you can be sure that had the book never existed and someone actually come along to tell us that, at 15 years old, we weren’t the center of the universe and that whatever trivial emotional turbulences we were experiencing amounted to less than nothing on the scale of human suffering, we wouldn’t have believed them anyway. With Catcher in the Rye, we didn’t even have to pretend to buy it. We really were the center of the universe.

Salinger so loved and understood teenagers, in fact, that at 35 he married one. In strict defiance of the “half your age plus seven” rule and in what can only be called his “living the dream” phase, he rejected the fame and literary praise being heaped on him, took a 19-year-old bride and lived as a recluse for the rest of his days (not that the marriage lasted that long). A quick question: would you ever leave the house if you were 35 and newly wedded to someone 16 years your junior? Seclusion seems an immediately more logical option.

The good news in all of this is now his offspring can plunder through the reported 15 completed manuscripts he left behind and sell the movie rights for his life at top dollar to Paramount (I think Ben Affleck would be perfect for the role, don’t you?), pissing all over his legacy, yes, but breathing much needed new life into freshman high school curricula everywhere. Jerome David Salinger: you will be missed?

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