Jules Crittenden and the anti-Salingerites double down on their criticisms of Catcher in the Rye as an “angst-ridden wankfest” (with some of the criticism this time even coming from those who’ve read the book), and offer what they are calling an “adolescent angst-free curriculum” in its stead:
That was fun yesterday, speaking ill of the dead with a shout out for angst-free education and common sense vs. commie sensitivities. Here’s a working list. The Forward Movement Readers’ English Lit curriculum. No habla adolescent angst. Just say no to Kumbayaists:
Romeo and Juliet (With the 1968 Olivia Hussey flick. I recall finding her dumbstrikingly hot when I saw it in class at age 15. I could sit around listening to “prithees” and “forsooths” and convoluted Elizabethan gobbledegook all day. Haven’t seen the newer R&J remakes, but if they don’t have a pole-axingly, gobsmackingly hot Juliet, it’s a waste of time.) Here’s the Shakespeare Made Easy version that include facing page translations and definitions in modern English, if you can’t hang. Not only, as bbmoe noted, do kids learn the value of taking a pulse, they learn all that West Side story why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along stuff about Jets and Sharks, as Mercutio gets skewered and goes out with extended ironic yammer, but also that the adult world is a complicated place where you need to pay attention to what the heck you’re doing, and end runs can be hazardous.
Well, hard to argue with any of that. I mean, after all — what can be less teen angsty than a double suicide brought on by adults keeping young love at bay…?
Ahem.
Listen: I noted this yesterday, but let me repeat it again. The Catcher in the Rye is no more a book about teen angst than Huckleberry Finn is a book about river rafting with human chattel, or Portnoy’s Complaint is about finding the most efficient way to masturbate into a brassiere.
In fact, were some aspiring writers to ask me which American novels I’d recommend for study on how to create a unique and sustained first person voice, those three are the novels I’d most likely recommend.
The truth is, one can easily mark a trajectory from Huck Finn to Catcher in the Rye to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, to, say, The Outsiders and American Psycho, in American literature, and have himself a pretty nice outline for a dissertation — with no mention of “teen angst” required, except to note that Salinger’s novel has achieved a certain reputation among those predisposed to viewing any first-person complaint from a teenager as an “angst-ridden wankfest” (while considering a dramatic depiction of actual teen angst ending in double suicide the height of art, if only because the man who wrote it is entrenched in the literary canon).
In Catcher, Salinger was able to create a voice that explores, in the most “modern” of settings (at the time) and among the most privileged of people, the kind of disillusionment with the material — marked by various preparations for adulthood, both formal and informal — that the Romantic poets had earlier plumbed in a different context. Only instead of “Nature” being the touchstone for the soul, to Holden, that touchstone is the unspoiled innocence of childhood (secured in his mind by the death of his younger brother). Wordsworth wrote “the world is too much with us”; Holden Caulfield “writes” Catcher in the Rye — or more accurately, he retells the story of a few days around Christmas time — and what the novel suggests (Holden, remember, is recalling events to a psychotherapist) about its narrator (clearly he’s intended as a sympathetic character; but is he presented as some sort of prophet? a martyr?), I’ll let you all decide for yourselves.
Of course to do so, you’re best off reading the thing.
Which, it turns out, is a lot more difficult than forming an opinion without having done so.
****
update: Naturally, it is your right as an American to speak, write, or even vote, from a position of unadulterated ignorance and entitlement. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
I’d provide you with an objective correlative to the above, but it occurs to me we’re living in one just now. In fact, how else could we end up with a Signifier in Chief?
how to create a unique and sustained first person voice
I’ve only read HF of the 3 you recommmend, but yes, that is what sustains the whole of Twain’s novel. A clever plot line with pedestrian narration is a snooze fest.
But a great voice can help even when describing what some may call boring suburbia – I’m thinking “The Lovely Bones”
:::sigh::: I really need to go back and read all those things that were obviously skipped in my HS english classes.
Even if they weren’t skipped in HS, it has been my experience that they are still worth re-reading, experience making the text so much more.
Although I can tell you that when people in the airport bar see you holding a copy of Catcher in the Rye they assume you must be an HS English teacher. Explaining otherwise seems to end the conversation rather abruptly.
I knew J.D. Salinger. He was a hellava talent.
Alas, Catcher suffered from the “teen-aged alienation anthem” label that was pressed on it from outside. My problem with the novel was that Holden doesn’t seem to learn anything, when it’s all said and done. He winds up missing his friends and heading back to school. Good first person, yes, but what the hell was the point of his stroll around New York?
Regards from someone who was driven to study German Lit because Coleridge and the damn albatross caused him to want to set his hair on fire.
jules, I thought we spoke about this yesterday. Have the courtesy of reading an author before you dismiss his book.
I think Portnoy’s Complaint was really about how there must be 50 ways to love your liver.
Look at this here, out of the rest of the context.
Now, ask yourself. Was there something for him to learn to begin with?
Regardless of what some lit instructors will tell you, there really DOESN’T have to be any change in a character. In fact, sometimes that lack of change is precisely the point.
I mean, there’s a reason Seymour Glass puts a bullet in his head. At least, HE had a reason.
how to create a unique and sustained first person voice
I’d suggest The Golden Globe by John Varley. Also doubles as an entirely-too-plausible vision of what mass media may look like in the future.
Regardless of what some lit instructors will tell you, there really DOESN’T have to be any change in a character. In fact, sometimes that lack of change is precisely the point.
JeffG
In many ways I believe we as readers want a change – we feel we are on a journey with the author and get a little personally peeved when we end up where we started.
That’s just personal taste of course. We all feel we are going somewhere and we project that on our reading material. Dear book, if I’m going to spend time with you, I want a payoff at the end.
/2 cents
added – Personally, I enjoy the journey for its own sake … the author doesn’t “owe me” anything. My assumed risk of time when I pick up the book.
When I write, poorly, it’s the dialogue that’s the devil. First person is like writing dialogue for hundreds of pages. Regardless of all else, that’s what impresses me the most. Similarly, I don’t really know what my favorite music means. Whether or not the piano has grown as a piano by the end.
Style. Technique. Etc. When it’s great, it’s worth appreciating. Period.
(Though, I felt there was more to Catcher than the obvious talent required in its crafting.)
There’s not much teen angst in the Hispanic canon. Couple a Spanish novels by women, maybe.
I just thought I’d mention that.
However, there’s a lot of political angst (80%) plus some mind-bending stuff (Borges, Cortázar, García Márquez) and existential angst (Unamuno). Even the Romantic-era literature turns out to be existential.
Don’t tell anyone I said this, but the canon is kinda thin, compared with English, French, and German.
In my case, I may not end up in the same place, but if the character who’s leading me through the story appears to be headed that way, I lose the ability to stay with him. And if I part company with the main character, I’ve parted company with the story.
But isn’t it disheartening, Jeff, how frequently and thoroughly everything is misread, from your posts to Liberal Fascism to first-person novels?
I thought we were supposed to be a highly literate society. Looks like we’re not.
Heh. When I do it, it’s more like writing character exposition for all those pages, because ultimately that’s what it is. Some dialogue, but mostly soliloquy — but the purpose is to expand the character, not the story.
In third-person, the characters attend the story, while in first-person the story attends the character. Does that make sense?
In many ways I believe we as readers want a change – we feel we are on a journey with the author and get a little personally peeved when we end up where we started.
So don’t go in with expectations. Take the ride that is offered, see where it leads, then mull it over to see if it was a good ride. You may conclude that you didn’t much like it or that the writer did a poor job, but there’s no reason to let your expectations do the judging.
It drove me crazy when each new HP came out; people were hatin’ on it because it didn’t go this or that directions, or their favorite character didn’t get enough face time, or their favorite theory got blasted out of the water.
Take the ride that’s offered; enjoy it for what it is rather that for what you wanted it to be, I’d enjoin.
But would they listen to me?
Nooooooo….
I didn’t mean to imply that all literature must have some didactic purpose. Yet, I agree with Darleen’s remarks @10. We readers accompany the author or protagonist on a journey, whether it’s a stroll around NYC or a raft down the Mississippi. If we choose to go along, we do want to get somewhere. (I speak for myself, of course.)
Regards.
we do want to get somewhere
Nowhere is still somewhere.
Yes, it does to me. Obviously, the story is still attended to, but, what’s so cool is that the story is necessarily viewed through the filter of the character. So, there is two stories. 1. The objective story. 2. What the narrator thought (or decided to say about) about #1. With unreliable narrators (especially Ellis’, for instance), that interplay is 90% of the fun.
With Catcher, this is intentionally made starkly obvious by the misread of the Burns’ poem. So, that’s a big part of how I read it, because Salinger put such a big red flag on it.
is = are
I hang around and work with relatively intelligent people, yet most of them are fascinated that I routinely read books I don’t have to, and are dumbfounded that I would rather read than watch TV.
As to society in general, I have trouble maintaining the belief they are truly sentient, let alone literate.
dicentra
It really comes down to personal taste – as a reader. Some people “hate” sci-fi, regardless of how well-written. Same with every genre.
Hopefully, most people will at least try something out of their usual comfort zones.
The character doesn’t have to change for you to understand why s/he did or didn’t. And that’s the journey, so far as I’m concerned.
I would very much enjoy, I think, teaching an online course in narratology. I think everyone can benefit from it. For instance, McGehee writes, “In third-person, the characters attend the story, while in first-person the story attends the character. Does that make sense?” And while I see what he’s saying, I don’t think this is true necessarily. There are plenty of first person novels that would have been better off written in the third person. and there are plenty of third person novels that would have been decidedly different had they been written in the first person.
The third person is vast — from the objective in Hemingway, to the omniscient in Henry James. And what we learn about the characters — along with the how, the who from, and the why – all play an important role in any close reading. In a way, The Great Gatsby is a kind of third-person story told through an unreliable first-person narrator who also plays a part in the third-person tale. Imagine that story written in the purely third person, however. How might it change?
I find the intricacies of narrative endlessly fascinating. Which is why I often bore people with it here.
wait – I thought Holden woke up to find himself changed into a cockroach or some other sort of bug …
Well, from that standpoint, I’d say Catcher meets the criterion. You begin with Holden speaking to a psychotherapist. You end knowing how he came to be there and why — at least, as it pertains to his sensibilities.
Spoken of openly, it might bore a few. Though I’d say less here than any other blog on the ‘net.
Of course, you do write it. All the time. There aren’t any readers here who don’t actually think there is an armadillo-as-narrator version of all this. That’s what I interpret as the little bastard dancing, anyways. Likewise, from the dead, to the inanimate, who-is-writing-this has always seemed to be a major theme here.
SO stolen, that line will be.
“…who-is-writing-this…?”
“SO stolen, that line will be.”
I’m gonna go with Yoda on that one.
I am legion, bh. And as legion, I am one.
Yoda stole that from every Jewish grandparent ever.
The hack.
It just occurred to me. The ‘dillo doesn’t give interviews. Won’t talk about what’s written here. There have been hints that he makes weird lifestyle choices.
What an epic Salingerian dickhead.
Bubbilah! Get me rewrite!
Is it any coincidence that the ‘dillo disappeared as Jeff became more and more disillusioned?
— or is that merely incidental, and the more telling fact is that he disappeared just after he discovered autoerotic asphyxiation…?
I would very much enjoy, I think, teaching an online course in narratology
Let me know when. I am happy to pay for online courses.
Here’s a consideration of Catcher in the Rye from The Smart Set last summer:
If so, they always go in threes.
Though, gotta say, I do hope the little guy is merely sitting in an Orgone Box deciding on the next groupie to bang.
It still is real. But not in the same way.
argh.
[…] how I don’t know what I’m talking about, plus a couple of good cocktail recipes. And here’s Jeff going all like “read the thing” on those of us who insist on our right as Americans to […]
Which is why I often bore people with it here.
Oh, shut up. This is the very crowd who isn’t bored with that kind of thing. Otherwise, why would it be this crowd?
There’s a novel in Spanish that’s allegedly written in second person, Aura, by Carlos Fuentes. “You go down the street and do this or that,” is how it reads. Supposedly, it’s you, the reader, who does this and that.
In a printed novel it doesn’t work all that spectacularly, because the reader is still a passive agent. Enter Zork and that all changes.
I’ve never read anything about the book (nothing serious, anyway), so I don’t know if anyone’s argued this, but Catcher mangles the reader-to-changed-character relationship. Keeping Holden static (apparently), it changes the reader—and a hell of a lot of people who don’t read it—into the ear he addresses: his therapist.
Diagnostician, at least. Salinger’s more than Holden’s, usually.
I suppose all first- and second-person works do that (first- more so than second-, interestingly; see the variance in vehemence of author-diagnoses between McInerney and Ellis, even before American Psycho), but Salinger really does. Uniquely, maybe.
Entirely knowingly, possibly. I haven’t read it in so long, I don’t remember if there’s a tell, like Portnoy‘s punchline.
Remember that this comes largely from non-readers. So they’re talking about the writer. His reputation confounded with his book’s. They don’t know its voice. They think they know his. They don’t. They know how he’s talked about, how it’s safe to talk about him, about a certain kind of writer, using the unread book as a prop.
Salinger, unread, is the go-to stand-in for the idea of an auteur, the curse-word non-idea of one. Any artist in any medium who displays a sustained concern for aesthetic goals over whatever—for work over the discussion of work, basically—is accused of morbid masturbation. He doesn’t have to be as personally antisocial as Salinger, and the voice he invents to do his work for him doesn’t matter much; it doesn’t take a Holden to elicit a “wankfest!” Even the voice of Worstward Ho gets it, and its very person is undecidable. Whoever it is, it’s Beckett. Jackin’ it in public, allegedly.
Anti-auteurism filters to the public as anti-“angst-ridden wankfest”-ism, and gets applied as such even in the absence of any known angst-ridden wankfest. There’s a dissertation in that. If Portnoy isn’t already it [said the doctor].
Whoa big.
Robbins wrote a book in the second person that I liked: Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas. And then there’s Bright Lights, Big City. So it can work.
And yes, some people here — many who’ve become readers during one of prolonged tantrums — don’t much like all the narrative stuff, and would prefer, I think, that I just stuck to “Obama and the Left are dookie heads”-kinda posts.
Let’s see:
I think I’ve read Another Roadside Attraction, Still Life with Woodpecker, and Skinny Legs and All.
Can’t for the life of me remember many of the plotlines, though. I think one of them involved whooping cranes.
from Ace’s that Jeff linked in the update
Indeed.
You could make the Obama is a dookie head kind of thing work, Jeff. I’d just as soon you do what makes you happy, though.
Precisely. This is what I meant when I wrote, “The character doesn’t have to change for you to understand why s/he did or didn’t. And that’s the journey, so far as I’m concerned,” then coupled it with, “you begin with Holden speaking to a psychotherapist. You end knowing how he came to be there and why — at least, as it pertains to his sensibilities.”
And yes, I’d say Portnoy — and much of Roth, frankly, especially something like My Life as a Man — perfects this type of narrative conceit.
some people here … don’t much like all the narrative stuff, and would prefer, I think, that I just stuck to “Obama and the Left are dookie heads”-kinda posts.
Well, that presents quite a conundrum, Jeff, given that on each blog, only one type of post is permitted. Which type of post will you choose as the One Type Permitted On Protein Wisdom?
Yup, a real head-scratcher, that one.
You make light, dicentra, but you don’t get emails requesting that you write more about x and less about y.
Ultimately, I do what I want. But that doesn’t change that some people don’t like some of it, which is all that I said to begin with.
Armadillo.
Though I don’t expect psycho to answer, does “whoa big” simply express psycho’s surprise that he’d done gone on at a proper length again in his previous post? Cause dude, it isn’t all that big. But it is good.
I must confess, though I’m not an emailer, I do look for the “Obama’s and idiot” spin in every post. I think it’s because I truly believe, with all my heart and soul that Obama is in fact an idiot. My guess is he didn’t read CitR. My guess is he’s read maybe one more book than he’s written. Which would equal one. And I’m thinking the one book he’s read is his own life story, and I would guess he’s read it more than once.
To continue Ace’s quote from Darleen’s #45:
But does Obama even know this? That might the root of Obama’s problem: he himself sees his
jobrole as Signification—which amounts to the same as Reification in the Lefty mindset.So.
On the one hand we have Obama and his bots living as protagonists in a heady narrative, and on the other hand we have the populace, which is being Signified quite against its will as the extras who carry the protagonist on its shoulders to eternal glory.
Cripes. I’ve known about the combating narratives that vie for control in society, but what do you do when the protagonists in one of those narratives get their hands on the levers of actual power?
It’s like when Moriarty figured out how to control the Enterprise from the holodeck. The difference being that Moriarty gained his strength by realizing that he was fictional. Obama, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to know that he’s real.
Shit, I’m a bit of a booster so of course I think this but I break it down to categories and balance.
1. Obama is a dookiehead is about perception (and all things like this, the news of the day). Noticing the dookieheadedness. In great detail. From different angles.
2. Narratology (or what seems to be viewed by others as pw’s weirdness, I’d say it is quite intentionally created new juxtapositions and voices) is about analysis. What do I make of what I perceive? Move part A over here, now how does it influence B?
The better we can do #1, the better we can do #2. AND, the better we do #2, the better we can do #1.
So, for me, it’s all about the balance this place creates. Because, looking at the subhead, everybody does summarize the news. But few then fuck around with it as hard as they can.
It is so pointless to be disappointed with the people who comment on Catcher in the Rye without reading it. It is important to remember whenever you are reading comments (at least mine) that they are written for the person writing them and not for you.
Those comments were clearly written for their own writer’s enjoyment because, like an anonymous fat guy masturbating in a motel window, nobody else got anything out of seeing them.
See? Sometimes the comments are clever, or even insightful, but they are a form of intellectual self-absorption that I think Salinger would have recognized if he had a computer.
Actually, now that I think about it, if JD had had a computer, I’m fairly certain that the specific gravity of Protein Wisdom would have drawn him into Jeff’s orbit eventually.
What if it was the thought of PW going to a pay format that did him in?
I got a messenger messaging about salinger… from a friend who has my copy and I got a phone call from Texas from my friend what has my copy before that one.
I don’t know where my copy of thriller is but I didn’t get no phone call when Michael went dead.
Look, I don’t love every single thing Jeff posts. Or everything that Darleen posts. Or that Dan posted, back in the day.
So I skip it and go to the posts I do like. No complaints, see?
See, it’s comments like this that make me wonder if you’re being facetious with the sycophancy.
Myself? I do. As such, I should be given the free access to the pay site. With a special gold star by my comments.
[Insert smiling emoticon here.]
this is very meta to where I think you know who’s a big fat dookie head? Mr. Obama.
Then it’s been objectively proven, ‘feets. Salinger > Michael Jackson. Suck it, dancin’ man.
I never read ‘Catcher in the Rye’. And as an emotionally-turmoiled teenager (as if there is one that isn’t) I did not need reinforcement on the emotionally-turmoiled front.
Reading the various reviews of Salinger at his death I am glad I spent my time with (a) C.S. Forrester novels; (b) AD&D; (c) wargames; and (d) my [then] girlfriend.
Plotting world domination with cardboard tiles, slaughtering paper orcs, reading historical fiction, and screwing seems much more healthy (mentally) than J.D. Salinger.
that make me wonder if you’re being facetious with the sycophancy
You will never know. :D
Catcher was never really my speed, but, then, neither was bitching about what a blogger chooses to blog about on his own blog.
I think this whole thread is bullshit because everyone knows that none of you know how to read.
I only wrote that because I have never read a book and it hurts me. So then I hurt those I love!
Sir Barky the Series. Still life as dog. Another character that never changes or grows. The audience does however.
I wonder what Obama thinks of Catcher in the Rye? For that matter, did Carl Rove ever read it? Would either of them do LSD with me and see space owls attacking my home town with tiny collectible baseball bats? Well? Would they?
I’ve read Catcher a number of times and, regardless of whether you think it’s a good story, it’s damned fine writing. When I read it in high school, I bought into the sort of rebellious, alienated youth in the “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” vein. As I got older, my view of it changed. I’ve begun to think of it as pointed social commentary (from an admittedly immature view point), but, even more, the story of a seriously broken young man who doesn’t have an idea of how to deal with the death of his brother, Allie.
Allie, who Holden presents late in the book, as one of just a few good things in the world has died, and Holden simply doesn’t know how to cope. So, in his head, he wants to be the protector of all that is innocent and good in the world, giving the author this great, acerbic voice to both comment on the shallow hypocrisy of modern life and to paint a story of a man teetering on the brink of a breakdown.
So I don’t see it as typical teen angst–not some story about typical teen behavior, but the story of an this teen boy who has been dealt a really lousy hand and is trying to get through.
Now, just on principle, I’m going to see if I can find my copy of the book. Failing that, I’m picking up my old copy of Sean Stewart’s “Perfect Circle” and calling it good.
>>And yes, some people here — many who’ve become readers during one of prolonged tantrums — don’t much like all the narrative stuff, and would prefer, I think, that I just stuck to “Obama and the Left are dookie heads”-kinda posts.
Well, they are dookie heads. But I read this stuff too. Just got a way of puttin’ things out there, man….
FTFY.
And I have tried to add to that body of work, no doubt. Perhaps I should have added, “if done properly” to my comment.
As a technical question, I might start a story in the third person and discover that the story is less interesting to me than one of the characters I’ve embroiled in it — and then I have to start over and try telling it in the first person instead. Or I might start a story in first person with a character I really want to develop, only to discover that the story is too interesting to waste on that character.
I don’t get to write many endings.
Greatest 1st person narrative: Big Chief in Sometimes a Great Notion.
Sorry. I’m an idiot and it’s late. I meant One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Salinger should have sent young Holden to Vietnam by way of Parris island. There’s no sense in wasting youthful angst.
So the dillo was David Carradine?
Now it all begins to make sense…
Naw. Dude. I do get a very disturbing Benny Profane vibe with some of your shit though.
Maybe it’s the Mexican demerol.
“Salinger should have sent young Holden to Vietnam by way of Parris island. There’s no sense in wasting youthful angst.”
MarkD,
O’Brien did. Later.
All societies operate with some level of hypocrisy – or in other words, all societies are made up of fallible and failing humans. This is not new information, or a unique observation.
What is bad, in my opinion, is giving up – giving up on ideals, on trying to meet them – you fail, you fall, you get back up. I do not think Mr. Salinger ever got beyond adolescence. He went all hermit, and I think it was a ‘you can’t fall if you are not tempted, and you cannot be tempted if you remove yourself from the world’ reaction.
It was his life, and he lived it as he wanted to.
Yeah. I had to read Catcher in the Rye in high school.
Frankly, it was boring. I got more out of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.
I wrote a book.
When they gave us Catcher in the Rye to read in junior high school, the teacher failed to mention that (a) Holden Caulfield is neurotic and (b) what neurotic means. I was in hero-searching mode at the time, and thought it would be the height of cool to be like Holden. Yet another dead-end road that I followed for a time. I blame Bush.
I have yet to understand the interest in and controversy over this dull book.
JG writes: “I find the intricacies of narrative endlessly fascinating. Which is why I often bore people with it here.”
Are you kidding? That’s why we come here.
And speaking of narratives: political narratives are interesting, in part, because of how unintricate they are. They are usually only a few slogans cobbled together to elicit an emotional response from electorate and thereby serve a political purpose, and are more full of holes then Mr Rogers’ lambswool cardigan after a moth infestation.
In a way, The Great Gatsby is a kind of third-person story told through an unreliable first-person narrator who also plays a part in the third-person tale. Imagine that story written in the purely third person, however. How might it change?
That book started me down the path of grad school in English Lit. Couldn’t continue, because I didn’t have the money, and I was trying to start my own business. My priorities have changed since then, but the idea of going back and getting at least my MA still intrigues me.
Anyway. Great question, Jeff. Can’t answer too much specifically, as I haven’t cracked the book in over 20 years. But my memories are rich with the wonderful imagery and language with which Fitzgerald painted. To address the question as specifically as I can, I don’t think it would work as well, as we need the first-person subjectivity to gain access to our own … flawed perspectives. Not sure how else to put it. The narrator (man, having a hard time pulling names out of my head–Nick?) tries to portray himself as aloof and objective. World-wise and -weary, if you will. A complete archetype of the Roaring 20s bruised cynic. Yet this very attempt at objectivity puts him at odds with the way he is caught up in Gatsby worship. And that loss of objectivity is part of what makes the narrative so confounding and contradictory. Delightfully and irritatingly so, in my opinion. If the novel were to be truly third-person, then we have much less of the story to pull apart and sort out for ourselves. It would still most likely be beautifully written, as I believe this was Fitzgerald’s attempt at slaying his own demons, so the artistic approach would have been equal. But the choice of narrative vehicle is critical to the unfolding of the story.
Not the truth, by any means. Just my opinion. But I think “The Great Gatsby” is one of the greatest novels ever written. The story captured my heart like few others. If I had any courage at all, I would drop everything and write full-time for as long as it took to develop my voice in a way that expressed itself as Fitzgerald did. Not that I should write the same way as he did, but that my expression would be as rich. ‘Though, given his obvious addictions, it may only be through massive suffering that he was able to find that voice, which I think is not an uncommon path that great artists take….
Darleen (way up in #1):
I just finished “The Lovely Bones”, it was amazing (although the end seemed to drag just a tad…but not so much to ruin the narrative). I sadly don’t have the time for a lot of books lately, but I read that one and I’d highly reccomend it to anyone who hasn’t picked it up yet.
As for “Catcher in the Rye”, it’s a brilliant book. Angsty wank fest? Bleh. No more so than any other decent depiction of a teenager. If I want to see an authentic teen angst wank fest, I’ll go watch any number of the films that Hollywood has had on offer for the last couple of decades or so.
Jeff, I understand your basic tenet, but I would argue that you go too far in dismissing the importance of a novel’s vehicle for expressing its point, vs. the importance of “the point” itself. True enough, Huck Finn isn’t about “river rafting with human chattel”, but that is the vehicle of the book. And I love Huck Finn – it’s one of the handful of books that I’ve read probably 5+ times – but I can see how, if someone finds undistilled rural Americana, or phonetically transcribed pidgin English, to be kind of grating, that would destroy the book for him. Similarly, while Catcher in The Rye isn’t about teenage angst, a self-centered obsession with typical teenage concerns is to some extent the vehicle of the book, and I can see how if someone finds that vehicle to be fairly off-putting, it would ruin the experience of the entire book, “point” and all.
I read the comments and noted that very little has been said about Ms. Hussey, who deserves better than that from all you brutes who are fixated on the male teen-angst wanker Holden.
American Psycho, while well written in first person narrative form, made me want to beat the narrator for his complete lack of moral action throughout the story.
And R&J, in the many remakes over the years on stage and screen, has done something that adds to art: it provided yet another film vehicle in which Leonardo di Caprio dies. Which, as Martha Stewart says, is a very good thing.
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