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With Love and Squalor
Cover of With Love and Squalor
With Love and Squalor
13 Writers Responds to the Work of J. D. Salinger
Borrow Borrow
Reading The Catcher in the Rye has become a rite of passage for young Americans, landing the book on bestseller lists (and banned book lists) each year, even though it was published a half century ago. What is it about J. D. Salinger and his body of work that has left such a lasting mark on American fiction? And who better to answer that question than the current generation of writers?
Here are fourteen of the most vital voices in the contemporary American fiction scene pulling no punches in response to a writer who continues to beguile, charm, fascinate, and frustrate generations of readers. Contributors Walter Kirn, Ren? Steinke, Charles D’Ambrosio, Emma Forrest, Aleksander Hemon, Lucinda Rosenfeld, Amy Sohn, John McNally, Karen E. Bender, Thomas Beller, Benjamin Anastas, Aimee Bender, Joel Stein, and Jane Mendelsohn turn themselves inside out as they discuss their personal reactions to reading Salinger classics–not only The Catcher in the Rye but also Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, and the short stories–and explore, with begrudging gratitude, how Salinger helped to form the deepest reaches of their literary imaginations.
Reading The Catcher in the Rye has become a rite of passage for young Americans, landing the book on bestseller lists (and banned book lists) each year, even though it was published a half century ago. What is it about J. D. Salinger and his body of work that has left such a lasting mark on American fiction? And who better to answer that question than the current generation of writers?
Here are fourteen of the most vital voices in the contemporary American fiction scene pulling no punches in response to a writer who continues to beguile, charm, fascinate, and frustrate generations of readers. Contributors Walter Kirn, Ren? Steinke, Charles D’Ambrosio, Emma Forrest, Aleksander Hemon, Lucinda Rosenfeld, Amy Sohn, John McNally, Karen E. Bender, Thomas Beller, Benjamin Anastas, Aimee Bender, Joel Stein, and Jane Mendelsohn turn themselves inside out as they discuss their personal reactions to reading Salinger classics–not only The Catcher in the Rye but also Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, and the short stories–and explore, with begrudging gratitude, how Salinger helped to form the deepest reaches of their literary imaginations.
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  • From the book
    Introduction

    There are a lot of things that most of us would rather not know about J. D. Salinger. What he eats or drinks. What he wears. What kind of father he is. Or any other of the various sordid details that have surfaced about his personal life in books by Ian Hamilton, Margaret Salinger, and Joyce Maynard. Personally, my interest was never in J. D. Salinger the myth. It was always in J. D. Salinger the writer.

    The revelations made about Salinger's personal life in these recent books don't affect my reading of his work because finding out who he is can't change my own personal history of discovering Salinger. Reading Salinger for the first time made me excited not only about Salinger. It made me excited about reading. It has now been fifty years since The Catcher in the Rye was published and more than thirty-five years since he published his last book, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour -- An Introduction, but there is still intense interest in Salinger today.

    While the recent coverage in books and magazines on Salinger has focused almost exclusively on his sustained seclusion, his romantic trysts, or his relationship with his children, what seems most interesting now is Salinger's profound influence on successive generations of writers. This includes a generation of young(ish) writers who are guiding our literature into the next century, most of whom were born at the time of or after Salinger withdrew from the literary world. But even though Salinger retreated, the writers in our collection were raised on Salinger in the same way that writers in the first half of the twentieth century were raised on Dickens and Twain. Salinger was a literary writer who was and has always been intensely popular.

    Nowhere is the passion for Salinger greater than amongst writers. Writers have a different, very sensitive, sometimes quite introspective view of the world that Salinger captured in his work. For many writers, The Catcher in the Rye so defined first-person narrative that it limited the world to a binary option: a writer could embrace Salinger's loose, impressionistic, conversational, and above all untrustworthy and unreliable voice, or reject it for crisp, minimalist erudition. There is a cadence to Salinger's words, particularly to Holden's speech, that is incredibly distinctive. Salinger didn't invent this mode, but he defined it in his readers' minds. Salinger's stories, elliptical and yet precise examinations of relationships, of emotional toxicity, didn't conform to the previously established structure. His plots didn't necessarily make sense (at least not immediately), and the characters Salinger created didn't embrace traditional values. Salinger's narration and style were innovative, yet the issues that he examined were incredibly universal: conformity, loneliness, community, family, friendships, and relationships with the opposite sex.

    One of the first impetuses toward the creation of With Love and Squalor was my discovery of a book entitled Salinger that was published in 1962 by Harper & Brothers. It was filled with very academic essays, most of which faulted Salinger for his feeble construction and his laissez-faire attitude toward language. The most readable one was by John Updike, but it struck me immediately that this book would be much better if it had been written in a less academic and more personal way.

About the Author-
  • KIP KOTZEN is a literary agent who divides his time between Los Angeles and New York. THOMAS BELLER is the author of two works of fiction (Seduction Theory, stories; The Sleep-Over Artist, a novel) and a founding editor of Open City magazine and mrbellersneighborhood.com. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The New Yorker, and he is a contributing editor to The Cambodia Daily.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    October 1, 2001
    Fourteen writers reflect on the impact of J.D. Salinger's oeuvre on their lives and work in With Love and Squalor, edited by literary agent Kip Kotzen and Open City founding editor Thomas Beller (The Sleepover Artist). Walter Kirn recalls having Catcher in the Rye snatched from his hands and hurled across the college dining hall immediately after John Lennon's murder by Mark David Chapman; Chapman believed the book gave him permission for the killing. Emma Forrest describes her effort to become the kind of young person " `invented' in the fifties by the two J.D.s Salinger and James Dean" in order to deliver the goods to her newspaper editor. Lucinda Rosenfeld weighs Franny and Zooey's unimpressive rebellions against what she sees as the nearly perfect prose of their eponymous book.

  • Library Journal

    September 1, 2001
    This collection of short essays by 14 contemporary fiction writers joins the spate of books celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Catcher in the Rye. It stands out because most of the writers come from an intermediate generation not those who had to sneak around to read Salinger before his work made its way into the canon, nor those being routinely assigned it today. Also, the emphasis here stays mainly on the work rather than the recent revelations about the man though several contributors grapple with the separation between the author and his books, and urine drinking is mentioned more than once. The pieces are personal rather than adulatory and so provide good models for student work. Thus, Lucinda Rosenfeld is more critical of Franny now than she was in her "Salinger phase." Jane Mendelsohn remembers a smart, funny preppy but now sees Holden Caulfield's darker, death-obsessed side. Aleksandar Hemon thinks Salinger's greatest asset is "his respect for children and the interest in the world that he shares with them." With its reasonable price, this collection is recommended for public and academic libraries. Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO

    Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Booklist

    October 1, 2001
    The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of "The Catcher in the Rye" has garnered quite a bit of attention, and in this anthology of thoughtful, articulate essays, young writers weigh in with their views on Salinger and his fiction. Love him or hate him, Salinger as well as his works have had a lasting effect on all of these writers. Many encountered him for the first time in high school, where "Catcher in the Rye" was required reading more often than not. Essays by Rene Steinke and Charles D'Ambrosio concern loss, sorrow, and isolation as seen through Salinger's eyes, and their own. Novelists Emma Forrest and Lucinda Rosenfeld both express their disappointment with Salinger; Forrest for having to live up to the ideal of youth he created, and Rosenfeld for her dissatisfaction with Franny's breakdown in "Franny & Zooey." Even the minor characters are significant, John McNally argues, both in Salinger's work and in our own lives. These intelligent and reflective essays will have readers eagerly reaching for their copies of Salinger's books. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)

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With Love and Squalor
13 Writers Responds to the Work of J. D. Salinger
Kip Kotzen
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