» Waiting for Salinger
A look at the last story to appear in print by the elusive J.D. Salinger, who turns 90 Thursday.
In general what has dated most in Mr. Salinger’s writing is not the prose—much of the dialogue, in the stories especially and in the second half of “Franny and Zooey,” still seems brilliant and fresh—but the ideas. Mr. Salinger’s fixation on the difference between “phoniness,” as Holden Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, ’50s feeling about it. It’s no longer news, and probably never was.
This is the theme, though, that comes increasingly to dominate the Glass chronicles: the unsolvable problem of ego and self-consciousness, of how to lead a spiritual life in a vulgar, material society. The very thing that makes the Glasses, and Seymour especially, so appealing to Mr. Salinger—that they’re too sensitive and exceptional for this world—is also what came to make them irritating to so many readers.
