Nine Stories

Damn, I’ve been so used to reading The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger over the years that I never felt the need to acknowledge or try Salinger at anything else. Salinger is fascinating, and within these Nine Stories there is some terrific writing. Things are so well hidden under the covers here, its subtly superb. From the spending a day with war veteran Seymour in a A Perfect Day for Bananafish to avoiding reality and facing adolescence in The Laughing Man, Salinger feels no need to explain, rather he just guides you through a sliver of a fictional life that has a deeper message. The central one, as I read it, being how America and its citizens dealt with themselves and the country post-war.

It’s about those who came back from war with post traumatic stress and those who were robbed of their childhood experience and were forced to be adults in a war they did not choose. It’s also about those who could not figure out how to integrate back into society then began to watch a country transform and retell the story of the war in a glorious and positive light, yet they saw the ugly and gruesome realities of it. Then it is also about the country transforming and changing in radical ways, to people growing narcissistic tendencies and becoming self-absorbed, and using those as a shield from the emptiness and void they feel in American society. On that last point, wow has that only gotten worse and worse 66 years later.

I really loved this because it was able to communicate some strong themes across the collection, some of which readers of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger may already be familiar with. It’s a nice change of pace to read a collection of short stories, the investment per story is small, but the experience is large. I basically sat with my coffee every morning and drank a story in until I finished over nine days, and came out thinking even more highly of Salinger’s writing.