Outgrowing J.D. Salinger

His works, precious in youth, seem like all talk in adulthood.

From an article in the Los Angeles Times...

By college I had become a Salinger snob, the kind of fan who all but shrugs off "Catcher" ("yes, it's the most popular, but is it his best work?") to sing the praises of "Nine Stories" (all of them, not just the ones about Esme and Bananafish), "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters." ("Seymour: An Introduction" was beyond me.) If Holden Caulfield was the headliner, the Glass family chronicles were the holy text, their teetering balance of intellectual and spiritual, of the mighty and the mundane a heady brew for anyone trying to live a life of high drama and actual worth. His characters painted their nails, pushed off their shoes, sat in the tub, lighted a cigarette, petted the cat, drank a glass of milk, lighted another cigarette, but to a man, woman and child, they sought and passionately believed in a state of understanding greater than their own. Call it God or grace or spiritual enlightenment, every story, every character lived and breathed at the glowing edge of something larger. For all his arched-brow cynicism, Salinger was just as sentimental and religious as C.S. Lewis.

He was also a deliciously specific and evocative writer. To this day I can close my eyes and see Phoebe's blue coat, the tangerine Les offered Franny, the damp and frayed letter Zooey reads in his cooling bath, the arch of the girl's foot Seymour kisses before heading up to the hotel room to shoot himself.

But it was the talk that sold him the hardest to those of us who still believed in the power of wit, who longed for a time when conversation was an art form, when talking was a talent. Salinger wasn't stingy with the dialogue, or monologue. It went on for paragraphs. In "Franny and Zooey" it went on for pages. In fact, you could argue, and some have, that Salinger is all talk.

And that is what I outgrew.