Happy 90th, JD
Thursday, January 1, 2009 
Salinger in 1951Charles McGrath of The New York Times has published an interesting though ultimately less-than-generous birthday tribute to J.D. Salinger, which comes with strange coincidence right on the heels of my recent post about a road trip in search of JD.
Interesting for its analysis of the only Salinger story I've never read--"Hapworth 16, 1924," which took up the bulk of the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker.
Less-than-generous for his rather condescending conclusions re: Salinger the man, which seem largely based on McGrath's reading of this, Salinger's final story.
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.
Another way to pose the Glass problem is: How do you make art for an audience, or a critical establishment, too crass to understand it? This is the issue that caused Seymour to give up, presumably, and one is tempted to say it’s what soured Mr. Salinger on wanting to see anything else in print.
Sadly, though, Mr. Salinger’s spiritual side is his least convincing. His gift is less for profundity than for observation, for listening and for comedy. Except perhaps for Mark Twain, no other American writer has registered with such precision the humor — and the pathos — of false sophistication and the vital banality of big-city pretension.
For all his reclusiveness, moreover, Mr. Salinger has none of the sage’s self-effacement; his manner is a big and showy one, given to tours-de-force and to large emotional gestures. In spite of his best efforts to silence himself or become a seer, he remains an original and influential stylist — the kind of writer the mature Seymour (but not necessarily the precocious 7-year-old) would probably deplore.
It's certainly looking unlikely that Salinger will publish before he passes anything he may have written over the past four decades of silence. Sure do hope, though, that he's saving a special posthumous surprise for those of us who still love him.
Oh, and happy new year.