Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

I continue to be horribly verbose, and I'd blame it all on Salinger but that's cheap and wrong based on past reviews. Regardless, I'm too rambling even before reading Salinger and now, after reading Salinger, I am Worse :)

1. I've read Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters at least 10 separate times over a span of 10 years, and I always stopped right before the journal portion. But I finally finished it all, please clap!

As always, you gotta love the dark humor Salinger pops in. Why would the missing groom's brother hop into a car full of the wife's angry family and friends? Because it's 1942, and Buddy is a freshly drafted member of the army. On the other hand, reading the excerpts from Seymour's journal.... oh God, it HURTS. Someone get him to therapy and on an SSRI possibly. Better still, never have drafted him into the army.

This is certainly the more accessible of the two stories and a great overview of Classic Salinger.

2. Seymour An Introduction. Honestly, it started off so slow and so horribly clunky. It's such a change from the first story, and I do wonder if that throws people for loop when they're bundled together in the same volume. On the one hand, I do wish Salinger tried to dial back on his run-ons because holy hell does his prose go on and on and on. But, on the other hand, I get why he employed that stream-of-consciousness style so like fine. I'll run with it but not too fast because my brain needs time to take in the new style.

But stylistic choices aside, I did enjoy Buddy breaking the fourth wall. Not necessarily every time when he would address the reader (although, contextually, I understand why it was done because Buddy is concerned about his writing and how it will be received; out of context of the story it is way too easy to assume it's Salinger being a smart-ass and interrupting the reader as his life got interrupted by fame/talking directly to the reader because apparently some people go that far for Salinger), but I absolutely loved when he'd update on the writing process. (Also the way this hits in our SNS-Era of life, where anyone with an internet connection can amass an audience no matter how large or small, and can all too easily find themselves aware of what content hits and what content sinks thanks to notifications and engagement metrics. The trick, of course, is to ignore such things in order to keep with your own tastes and enjoyments, but by God, it is hard. / Salinger, you would've absolutely hated Twitter and that's your only saving grace beyond your writing.)

And, of course, the implications it poses for Buddy Glass to be revealed as the author of A Perfect Day for Banana Fish, Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, Seymour An Introduction, and Teddy! Talk about meta! Especially because it forces the reader to change how they're engaging with the text. Originally you read it as if it's Salinger writing to you and popping in his idiosyncrasies and usual topics when Seymour An Introduction asks you to set that aside and consider the story and not the writer. This being published after the hoopla of Catcher, one can hardly blame Salinger for trying anything to put his characters up front and himself hidden behind the typewriter. The irony is that this seems to have failed, both because Salinger will always pop in his own interests and beliefs within the text or spoken from a character, so previous readers can continue to read his works as if it's a nice, cozy conversation between the two of them. But in spite of that, it's very neat that instead of leaving the reader to wonder what kind of writer Buddy is, all you have to do is recall what you've already read.

[As an aside: Frankly, it is a shame in my opinion that some people (fans, critics, scholars, whatever) have taken this to mean that Buddy Glass is Salinger's avatar and therefore he's writing directly to us. It ignores the premise of the story and destroys it as a work of fiction! (Or, they say Seymour is his avatar--that's worse!--or Holden Caulfield, and it's infuriating in the sense that it ignores these characters as characters and makes every story into a proclamation/conversation straight from Salinger's typewritter and into your hands. Like truly J.D. Salinger is the only male author I can think of off the top of my head to get the same treatment as any female author--you used elements of your life in writing this, so it must all come from your life/you based a character on yourself, right? So you are this character / to be clear, I never thought Salinger was earnest about saying he was Holden, that had to be a ploy to shut down movie talks after his experiences with the adaptation of Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut because who in their right mind would cast a middle-aged man to play a teenager.)]

Anyways, that parenthetical horror aside, as always with Salinger, what I love most in his works is what he doesn't write but leaves hints of. Buddy tells the reader he's writing about Seymour because he wants to keep his memories and love of Seymour alive. Buddy is doing this some 11 years after Seymour's death, and even then he says he cannot even bring himself to write about a thirty or thirty-one year old Seymour

(the age that he killed himself)

. Salinger doesn't phrase this so explicitly, but there's a reason why he writes "even to bring him up that exceedingly unhoary age" about the age of thirty-one to point to how young that age still is.

Buddy continues to describe how strange it is to be in his forties and reminiscing on his youth, but he isn't saying this in praise of youth itself or to disparage himself for focusing on his and Seymour's childhood. He says it to point out the simple heartbreaking fact that he is now older than his older brother, and that no amount of love can ever bring his brother back to life, that time will continue to pass and Buddy will grow older still while Seymour stays forever thirty-one. And to me, this is the payoff to sticking with the book, the things that Salinger never explicitly writes but sinks into you as you read.

Seymour An Introduction is definitely not an easy or enjoyable read, and I agree it's not for the casual reader of Salinger (I have a "I must read Franny and Zooey once a year to reset my brain to normal but I'd enter into a fist fight with Salinger for how he treated women and girls in his life" type of relationship to Salinger). It meanders and wanders and wants you to do the same, whereas impatience at knowing the book is so short despite its wordiness will hit back hard. But it's moments like the above that makes it worth it in the end.

Content Warnings

holly_ey's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.75

Content Warnings

winonawriter's review against another edition

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emotional funny inspiring reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Content Warnings

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