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[Thursday 3pm #11] My thunder stolen : a sequel to the Catcher in the Rye June 11, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in J.D. Salinger, Library of Babel, Thursday 3pm feature posts.
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Having turned 90 in January, J.D. Salinger is in the news, suing an author who calls himself J.D. California to prevent him publishing a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye called ‘60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye’.

The novel already appears for pre-sale on Amazon. The publisher is of dubious reputation, and the buzz around the book itself is not positive. If anyone was going to try to pull this off, it would have to be brilliant. As the title suggests, this sequel starts with Holden at 76, apparently losing his marbles and revisiting New York City.

In 2004 on my old blog (which was lost forever when the modblog servers went down permanently back in 2006) I wrote a creative post about a sequel to the The Catcher in the Rye called Holden Rides Again. In my post, I had obtained the manuscript from a girl who was romantically linked with J.D. Salinger’s son, Matty (star of an infamously bad telemovie version of Captain America – I’m not joking, this much is true). I gave a plot outline for the manuscript and was pleased when one person left a comment saying they couldn’t wait for it to be published for real.

J.D. Salinger has said that Holden exists only in the covers of the book; that there’s no more to tell. But for so many fans, myself included, that’s not true. I would love for him to have come alive for longer, to have read more of his adventures, to have found out how such a distraught youth might live the rest of his life.

In The Library of Babel, my new novel, the new draft actually starts with Tom finding a manuscript copy of J.D. Salinger’s sequel to Catcher in the Rye in the rare book room of the library. It’s a move that I’m in two minds about; I don’t want to dwell forever in the shadow of Catcher (characters reference it in my first novel; and originally in my second, one of the characters was named after Jane Gallagher, but this is gone now). But the point was something else – the sequel is about what happens when the angsty sixteen year old has to grow up. What comes next? What comes after deciding everyone’s a phony?

I wanted to situate my novel as an exploration of these themes. I have consciously left behind themes of adolescence and want to write about the mid to late twenties, and the challenges of living at peace with the world, while still trying to be authentic.

I may have to rethink using the sequel to Catcher in the Rye at all. In case it gets edited out, and in light of J.D. California’s hype, here’s my sequel to Catcher in the Rye, in the form of chapter four of the Library of Babel:

Holden rides again

Have a read and then vote in the poll, just like reality TV:

In defence of Holden June 9, 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in J.D. Salinger, reading.
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Holden Caulfield that is, star of The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not old enough or mature enough yet to renounce my love of this book. It’s my favourite book. But reading this review of The Catcher in the Rye today disturbed me. He’s not deep, she argues; his version of deep is to dismiss the whole world as phony and have a nervous breakdown. If you think that’s profound you’re still adolescent.

Actually, I’m not going to leap to the defence of Holden. I haven’t the energy. But I think I will be horrified if, like the reviewer Kathy, I ever get to the point of renouncing Holden and everything that book has meant to me over the years.

The last time I re-read it in 2005 I had finally come out of an adolescent posture of defying the whole world, and I still loved it. It’s not just profound, Catcher in the Rye, it’s also beautiful and funny, and that counts even if you think you’ve outgrown Holden’s ‘phony’ insights.

Maybe it’s time to read again. See if I’ve grown up yet.

Book review: The Sportswriter by Richard Ford October 18, 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in J.D. Salinger, authors, book review.
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Dirty realism? 

Richard Ford was friends with Raymond Carver.  Figures. The Sportswriter seemed to me like the novel Carver would have written if he ever wanted to. (Presumably, he thought short stories were much more important.) The genre’s usually called dirty realism, but that doesn’t sound right to me, because these writers are both so eloquent, even when they’re writing about the grit of everyday life. Dirty realism sounds like it should describe the sort of boring squalid lives of the characters of Andrew McGahan’s  Praise.

 Both writers have a poetic way with everyday American life, with the small hopes and comforts of ordinary Americans. Carver’s characters were more working-class/trailer trash types, though, while Frank Barscombe, the narrator of The Sportswriter, is an educated journalist who mentions James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

A grown-up Holden Caulfield on antidepressants?

I hope not, but that’s sort of how Frank Barscombe sounds. As a great American character, he falls somewhere between the eloquence of Holden and the ordinariness of Rabbit Angstrom.

 Like Holden Caulfield, he handles a crisis by ringing up various ex-girlfriends / his ex-wife and catching a train into New York.

 Women in Frank’s Life

It is not till the end when he says it explicitly that I realised what he really wants more than anything – reconciliation with his ex-wife, known befittingly as ‘X’. It is an accomplishment that it made me so sad it didn’t happen.

It’s almost as sad watching things fall apart with his girlfriend Vicky. There’s never an argument, only her moving further and further away from him over the course of weekend. The reasons are opaque to me, and probably to Frank as well. They don’t have enough in common? The phony way he spoke to her father? The fact he got caught going through her handbag?

Hitting home: Frank as abandoned writer

What moved me most – or scared me, maybe – was the fact that at 26 (my age now) Frank abandoned his writing career after a successful first book. He got to the point where he couldn’t write; he would sit down to write, but do nothing. Here he is in the novel, thirteen years later, a successful sports journalist with such small ambitions, living under a spell of dreaminess – which seems remarkably similar to life on antidepressants.

Perhaps I should take comfort in the fact that Ford himself seems to have abandoned writing for a while – after two well reviewed early books – only to come back with the gigantic success of The Sportswriter.

8/10