The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger

An audio book, and all.

I've read this book before, at least twice, but it's surprising (to me) how much of it I've forgotten. After seeing a documentary about Salinger on TV recently, in which the amazing success of this novel was reported, (Wikipedia says that 65 million copies have been sold) I acquired this recording and listened to the novel over the past few weeks.

Much has been said and written about Catcher, and I doubt that I can add much to the discussion, from the standpoint of literary criticism. What I will say is how strongly I am convinced that Salinger, whether wittingly or not, was describing a young person suffering from something that would today be diagnosed as some variety of mental illness. I am not saying that today's interpretation of Holden's behavior would be beneficial, but that the difference in how such behavior is perceived today is noteworthy.

Imagine a person under the age of 18 wandering freely in New York City, drinking in bars, staying in a hotel where he is offered the services of a prostitute, entering his own home in the middle of the night to visit his little sister, then leaving to seek refuge with a former teacher who seems very likely to be a pedophile.

In 2014, this would be a very different story, I think.

The Praises and Criticisms of J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye

Catcher in the Rye author J. D. Salinger Dies (CBC)

July 16, 1951 review of Catcher in the New York Times

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

Patty Berglund (nee Emerson)

Walter Berglund Patty's husband
Richard Katz Walter's friend, and at times Patty's lover, but that's complicated.

Joey Berglund
Janice Berglund ... son and daughter of Patty and Walter

From p.200 , on which Richard (a successful musician and songwriter currently broke due to his own behavior) is being "interviewed" by the son of a wealthy customer for whom he is building a rooftop deck in Manhattan:

Q. What do you think of the MP3 revolution?

A. Ah, revolution, wow. It's great to hear the word "revolution" again. It's great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavor and you have to spend another buck. That era which finally ended whenever, yesterday--you know, that era when we pretended rock was the scourge of conformity and consumerism, instead of its anointed handmaid--that era was really irritating to me. I think it's good for the honesty of rock and roll and good for the country in general that we can finally see Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop for what they really were: as manufacturers of wintergreen Chiclets.

Q. So you're saying that rock has lost its subversive edge?

A. I'm saying it never had any subversive edge. It was always wintergreen Chiclets, we just enjoyed pretending otherwise.

Q. What about when Dylan went electric?

A. If you're going to talk about ancient history, let's go back to the French Revolution. Remember when, I forget his name, but that rocker who wrote the "Marseillaise," Jean Jacques Whoever--remember when his song started getting all that airplay in 1792, and suddenly the peasantry rose up and overthrew the aristocracy? There was a song that changed the world. Attitude was what the peasants were missing. They already had everything else--humiliating servitude, grinding poverty, unpayable debts, horrific working conditions. But without a song, man, it added up to nothing. The sansculotte style was what really changed the world. 

I read this book slowly, from about the middle of January to yesterday (5 March 2014). It is, I think, a fairly decent characterization of our time. The characters are a little bit unbelievable, perhaps a little too cardboard-cutout for their own good, but nonetheless they all represent a bit of what makes up America in the early 21st century. The plot is well done, made up of the points of view of the main characters in a way that kept me interested -- because each of these people are quite intense, and they can begin to wear you out.

Should there be anyone here to read it, this book might be a good reference for future inhabitants of Earth.

American Bloomsbury, by Susan Cheever

An audio book.

This book is an account of the lives and interactions of some of the denizens of Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century. These are none other than Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and various members of their respective families.

I had not realized how close together all of these worthies had lived, excepting possibly Thoreau and Emerson. Furthermore, I had known little or nothing of Alcott, except that she was the author of Little Women, and Fuller was only a familiar name.

Cheever has written an interesting and useful account here, which highlights a time of intellectual brilliance in the young United States, in the time leading up to the Civil War. The story continues through that war, in which Alcott worked as a battlefield nurse. (Whitman is also mentioned in this account, of which I am reminded, for he also nursed the wou8nded in that grisly theatre.)

This might have been a little heavy for the driving-and-listening environment. When piloting the car becomes a little thrilling, one's attention tends to wander. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I would have had the motivation to finish this book from paper (a judgement on me and my dismal attention span, not on Cheever or her book), so I'm glad to have gleaned what I did by listening.

Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon

Copyright 2013, by Thomas Pynchon.

It took me until about page 77 before I decided that I could read this book. I almost gave it up. It's a mess of hip conversations, and it's set in 2001. But once I began to recognize the character Maxine as someone that I could actually care about, I wanted to keep reading, and find out what's going on. So I almost feel as if I skipped the first 77 pages.

This is from page 140:

"Madoff Securities. Hmm, maybe some industry scuttlebutt. Bernie Madoff, a legend on the street. Said to do quite well, I recall."
"One to two percent a month."
"Nice average return, so what's the problem?"
"Not average. Same every month."
"Uh-oh." She flips pages, has a look at the graph. "What the fuck. It's a perfect straight line, slanting up forever?'
"Seem a little abnormal to you?"
"...it's got to be a Ponzi scheme..."

And this from 143:

"Future of film, if you want to know--someday, more bandwidth, more video files up on the Internet, everybody'll be shootin everything, way too much to look at, nothin will mean shit. Think of me as the prophet of that."

From page 432:

"Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage -- ... [this ellipsis is mine, as is the next. The ones in the following passage are from the text]
"...hashslingrz and them are all screaming louder and louder about 'Internet freedom,' while they go on handing more of it over to the bad guys ... They get us, all right, we're all lonely, needy, disrespected, desperate to believe in any sorry imitation of belonging they want to sell us... We're being played, Maxi, and the game is fixed, and it won't end till the Internet--the real one, the dream, the promise--is destroyed."

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

A novel. Copyright 2001 by Jonathan Franzen.

Among other things, this is the story of the Lambert Family, of St. Jude, a fictional place that may be intended to make us think of St. Paul, MN. Alfred and Enid are the parents of Gary, Chip, and Denise. This novel moves back and forth in time, seemingly without effort, and illuminates the corners of all their lives, from the time when Alfred and Enid were very young to when they are, in the end, rather old.

This is a thoughtful and well-written story of American culture and life, and a useful picture of the world and the USA at the beginning of the 21st century.

I look forward to reading more from Franzen.

Here's a review from the NY Times dated, ominously, 9 Sept. 2001.

Saturday, by Ian McEwan

The entire plot of this novel takes place on a Saturday in February 2003. Neurosurgeon Henry Perowne wakes up early and has a very full day. In the course of this day he sees every member of his family, including his elderly (demented) mother and drunken poet father-in-law. In addition to the reunion, Perowne faces a serious and dangerous confrontation.

I was glad to find that this book was not like the last McEwan I read, which had a trick ending. Saturday was a thoroughly good read, with a great plot and plenty to think about. There is much debate in the book about the wisdom or folly of invading Iraq, and speculation about what the outcomes of such action--or, indeed, the outcomes of inaction--might be.

There is an issue toward the end that I don't want to be too specific about as it would spoil the book for another reader, but I do think there's an unrealistic representation of the professional behavior of a surgeon here. I doubt that the event described near the end of the story would or could have taken place in a British hospital, but I suppose I could be wrong.

McEwan includes an interesting American, Jay Strong, who has come to London to work as an anesthetist, thereby reducing his salary by a great deal, because he loves (1) socialized medicine, and (2) a British woman.

A Guardian / Observer review.

The Overlook, by Michael Connelly

This was an e-book from the PC Library.

This book was quite short, but still pretty entertaining. Harry Bosch solves a murder in spite of interference from the FBI, who seem determined to turn the incident into a national security issue. Bosch doesn't think it is.

As I've been reading a number of Wambaugh's LAPD novels lately, I was interested to note several details in common, for example, the mention of the Federal Consent Decree under which the LAPD was operating (still is? I don't know). Of course, most of these details are simply factual, so they would have to be identical.