Most Americans find fame fascinating and, even more so, the lucky suckers illuminated by its glare. We report star sightings to our friends, we read
Most Americans find fame fascinating and, even more so, the lucky suckers illuminated by its glare. We report star sightings to our friends, we read People magazine in our dentist's office (thank god for dentist's offices), we flip through National Geographic while in line at the grocery store. Some form of cultural osmosis allows us to refer to Brad and Jennifer and even Gwyneth sans surname, as if they were our friends; conversely, this phenomenon grants stars permission to refer to themselves that way, and requires us to do the same. Ten points if you know Madonna's last name, or even her first. What did his parents call The Artist Formerly Known as Prince?
Writers don't fall easily into this pack. While like actors and musicians and select politicians, we refer to them by single names, often with writers it's the surname we choose. We talk about them like we talk about intimidating professors — we might gossip about them, but rarely with them, nor could we imagine doing so. Writers are a step removed, by the nature of their solitary art, and we handle them that way. Few people spend hours critiquing what writers are wearing in their dust-jacket photos, and the paparazzi aren't paid to camp out on Roth's or Updike's lawn. This may be because, with the exception of "Oprah novels" and Harry Potter, Americans have fallen out of love with reading since the advent of the TV.
But there is a Harry Potter for nearly every generation, a book that touches a large enough cross-section of the population that it is called a classic (irregardless of shelf-life) and confers upon its author a neverending series of photo opportunities. In 1945, that book was J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye — but unlike most writers, grateful for every camera pointed their way, killing themselves on book tours as they slave to move the book, Salinger fled the limelight and attempted to erase himself from the greedy, gossipy minds of the barely literate masses. He moved to Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1955, and though he continues to write each day, storing his work in a massive room-sized vault, he hasn't published a word since the spring of 1965.
Yet despite Salinger's retreat from public life, he is undeniably a star. It's been 45 years since Catcher in the Rye debuted, and it's still easily identified by its plain red cover (discontinued in 1997, replaced by white) and its universal appeal to adolescents and other world-class freaks. (It's said that John Lennon's killer had a copy on his person when he approached the Dakota . The collision of so many icons in one spot in space and time deserves an essay in itself). Somehow, without lifting a finger, by breaking the cardinal rule of stardom and refusing to connect with his audience, Salinger has become a cottage industry. For decades, he's supported himself and his children and a collection of young women on the royalties from his own books, and now he's been transformed into a product from which his children and his women can support themselves on the royalties of their own. Product placement springs from fame in those rare cases when it doesn't create it.
Which leaves us wading through a muck of memoirs hawking "Salinger For Sale," most notably Joyce Maynard's whorishly publicized At Home in the World, (first excerpted in Vanity Fair in 1998), and the more recent Dream Catcher, written by Margaret Salinger and released to far less fanfare early this fall. If you're wondering why I've waited an entire season to review the Salinger book, and two years to discuss the Maynard, let me suggest that I subscribe to the "no such thing as bad publicity" theory, and I don't want to be seen as banging my drum for such drivel as these books clap between their covers. But even drivel contains within it subsets such as "guilty-pleasure," "fripple," and "fluff." At Home in the World is all these. Dream Catcher isn't — but I'll get to that.
Joyce Maynard first came to the attention of the world — or at least, readers of the New York Times — in 1972, when at the age of 18 she published an essay in the Times Sunday Magazine called "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life," and was featured, long-haired, big-eyed, and cross-legged, on the magazine's front cover. The world took notice — or at least Jerry Salinger did. With this first confession — that the reclusive J.D. goes by Jerry with his friends — the book quickly devolves into a rendition of starfucking taken to its most literally frustrated extreme. After several months of correspondence, Jerry (now 53) begins to phone Joyce, and then suggests she visit him in Cornish overnight, an event for which her mother prepares Joyce not by warning her of the lecherous advances of older men, but by sewing her daughter an A-line dress decorated in letters of the alphabet to accentuate Joyce's childlike charms. In short order, Joyce has dropped out of Yale and moved in with Jerry, who subjects her to a diet of nuts and, on special occasions, cheese, drills her in homeopathy, with which he's obsessed, and installs her in his bed though she's barely older than his teenaged son and daughter.
And that's where the trouble starts. Try as they might, Jerry and young Joyce can't consummate their relationship because Joyce is suffering some sort of gynecological problem that refuses him admittance, no matter how hard he tries or how carefully he examines her problem in a homeopathic light. After about a year of this, the relationship abruptly ends, Jerry tells Joyce to pack her bags, and he never speaks to her again — until, in 1997, she shows up on his door to find him living with yet another young paramour, and asks him what meaning she had in his life. He asks if she's writing a book, she confesses that she is, and he condemns her thus: "You have spent your career writing gossip. You write empty, meaningless, offensive, putrid gossip. You live your life as a pathetic, parasitic gossip."
And that's the best part of this book. As long as Maynard sticks to the gossip, she's got you hooked — but, sadly, Maynard doesn't conclude her memoir with her banishment from Cornish. Instead, she spends 200 additional pages telling us about the 20 years following her episode with Salinger, which is deadly boring (aside from writing the book upon which the movie To Die For was based), and I suspect Maynard knows it. She wrote this memoir, and her publishers packaged it, as a Salinger tell-all — she assumed the point of interest was Salinger, and she was right. To pretend she was expressing some larger point about the human, or even the female, experience is remarkably cynical; to believe it, incredibly naïve.
But at least Maynard's book makes good on its promise to reveal J.D. Salinger to his public — Margaret Salinger's does not. Dream Catcher, which purports to be a daughter's recollections of her famed father, begins promisingly enough with a history of both sides of her family. However, Ms. Salinger seems satisfied with presenting information, rather than analyzing it; for instance, we're told that the young J.D. ran away a lot as a child, but never offered any explanation as to why, or as to how that might have informed his development as an artist or young man. On those rare occasions when Ms. Salinger does attempt to more closely examine her father, she does so through the cipher of his work, or other people's (she quotes Maynard throughout) rather than relaying memories of his real-life behaviors or attitudes. We're endlessly subjected to Lit Crit 101 as she deconstructs the texts instead of the man. But that's not the worst of it: The bulk of Ms. Salinger's book is a color-by-numbers memoir of her own life, which might have been salvageable if, by her proximity to her father, we were able to glean information about the man himself. However, Salinger spent the bulk of her youth in boarding school, so most of her memories don't include him at all.
Ultimately, the only thing that Dream Catchers succeeds at is emphasizing Salinger's estrangement from her father, form- and function-wise. Her content may be empty, but her style is worse. You get the feeling this book was rushed into publication before the elder Salinger could take action and stop it — how else to explain footnotes that run half-a-page, yet the absence of an index? But Jerry needn't have worried — in the final analysis, there's no news here.
