My latest in PJ Media is a VIP article. I am happy to be able to offer you a 5% discount on becoming a VIP member at PJ Media. Just enter the code SPENCER when you sign up here.
At times, frankly, I find it pretty slim pickings, and that time, I must inform my old fair-weather friend, the general reader, is now.
Fans of J. D. Salinger will recognize not just one, but two phrases in that sentence that I purloined from the much longer, more interesting, and better-crafted opening sentence of Salinger’s idiosyncratic, unique, and beguiling novella, Seymour: An Introduction. Salinger remains beloved among his fans despite the fact that he published just four small books, for cryin’ out loud, in the middle of the twentieth century, one of which (The Catcher in the Rye) is still handed out to middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, heavy with the mantle of a “classic.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
Hoi Polloi says
As I understand it from teachers, things have changed from the earlier era when Salinger’s book was assigned. Now, students don’t enjoy Catcher in the Rye, and don’t see Holden Caulfield to be a character toward whom they feel sympathetic. I think their lives are so different that they can’t relate. I saw the same to be true of Little Women; they can’t relate to a larger, fatherless due to war family of girls who were meant to represent paths they now don’t see in their daily lives.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
What an unexpected delight. The greatest American prose writer — save for Nabokov — of the 20th century.