A Few Lousy Words About J.D. Salinger

Before yesterday, there was only one celebrity death that affected me one some level. I was in a Starbucks when a barista told me Jimmy Stewart died. By that point, he’d probably not made a movie in thirty years. I was depressed for two days.

This is how I heard about J.D. Salinger’s death: I got an AP mobile push notification on my iPhone while I was sitting in a conference room, rehearsing a presentation. The way we live now, with everything broadcast so instantly, probably offended him on some deep, fundamental level.

There will be, I’m sure, words and words to come about his life. Most of us know the basics. Famous young genius who wrote a book about a teenager, then holed himself away in a cabin for fifty years, never to publish again.

His seclusion inspired pilgrimmages, the novel Shoeless Joe (which became the movie, Field of Dreams) and endless speculation about just what he was doing in there. Most figure he’s been writing the whole time. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Catcher in the Rye was not required reading at Mount Carmel High School or the University of Illinois. But Franny and Zooey we got, senior year, I think, right around winter break. Father Carroll, if I never thanked you for that introduction, I am now.

Franny and Zooey is slightly more obscure, or at least as obscure as a work can be from a writer who only has four published books, can be. It’s about the Glasses, a shambling family who live in New York, the breakdown that Franny Glass is having, and how her brother Zooey tries to help. It’s not a normal novel, filled with Eastern mysticism and literary quotes and letters written from one Glass to another, but I love it just the same.

It’s not that J.D. Salinger ever made me want to be a writer. (A notion oft-stated to the point of cliche.) But he showed me how you can take all the weird, unusual parts of your personality and all the things you love and use them, instead of feeling you’ve got to hide them all away so that people think you’re normal. Whatever that is.

If I had to pick a single thing about his writing, about the work, that struck me, it would be this brief passage:

“Enough. Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your heart.”

I always liked to think that this was J.D.’s advice to his readers. Substitute your name for Zooey’s and the word act for your deepest passion.

And go.