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1 4 7 R T O S C R A T C H A N I T C H S A L I N G E R S M O L L Y M c Q U A D E Halfway into Salinger, published in September to coincide with the release of a documentary film of the same name, one trips over a startling piece of writing, ten pages long. Although it stands out immediately, I didn’t see it coming. For this largely ‘‘unwritten’’ book is indeed, in certain important respects, hostile to writing. That is the book’s nature. Instead of being written, Salinger is composed mostly of scrappy, edited new interview transcripts and short, recycled excerpts from previously published works, ranging from reportage to fiction. It is stu√ed with brief and breezy oral or dictated remarks. Promotional-sounding ‘‘yay!’’ exclamations and asides dot the pages. So do sturdy critical or interpretive pointers, sometimes obvious or a√ected. One also finds awed gasps, occasional haughty academic tirades or retorts, pretentious prolegomena, gossip, S a l i n g e r, by David Shields and Shane Salerno (Simon and Schuster, 700 pp., $37.50) S a l i n g e r, a film, directed by Shane Salerno, based on the book by Paul Alexander (The Weinstein Company, 2013) ‘ ‘ L o s e n o t h e a r t ’ ’ : J . D . S a l i n g e r ’ s L e t t e r s t o a n A s p i r i n g W r i t e r, Exhibition, the Morgan Library, September 10, 2013, through January 12, 2014 1 4 8 M c Q U A D E Y daydreams, stage whispers, and almost everything else short of the frayed text from rumpled ketchup bottle labels. (Sometimes the best ideas, I believe, come from miscellaneous sources like the discarded matchbook covers skittering late at night across 14th Street.) If my summary of the contents of Salinger sounds also like a fit description of Finnegans Wake or of a postmodern remake of The Arcades Project, please remember: Salinger, unlike those, is not really ‘‘written.’’ This matters. Though the book is organized into thematic chapters that focus on some of the main concerns of J. D. Salinger’s life and work (despite his family’s silence on those subjects), the chapters tend, deliberately, to circle, sway, mutter, and burst, in the manner of a collective stream of consciousness, from the pressure of their copious , motley materials. Every chapter o√ers an intriguing crazyquilt of reported fact, conjecture, soliloquy, theory, pew sonorities, and spitballs, each credited to its respective source. In the book’s society of yakkers, the kids in the balcony never shut up and are always chewing gum. And thus, in this book a piece of actual writing – whatever its origin, motive, form, or inspiration – is bound to jar and claim attention. Even so, I wonder whether the author of those ten pages, David Shields, means what he wrote in them sincerely or ironically, or with ironic sincerity, or with sincere irony. Regardless, I suspect that if his conspicuous tour de force, secreted mid-volume, were to pass unnoticed by critics and readers, this might please Shields. For if it were to be ignored, he would then have proved a rhetorical point: that the day of writing as we know it (or knew it) has passed. Shields has made this point before in several of his previous books. I hope that such a day hasn’t passed. Even so, the idea doesn’t appall me, nor does the book. Both interest me, for Salinger is anything but an idle experiment. I find myself convinced by certain elements, annoyed by some, smiling at others. Yet still there are those ten pages of unusual, infernally accomplished writing, like an impassioned, contrary love letter penned to Salinger by a mi√ed – or jilted – reader who cannot quite stop writing, no matter what the current rewards or inducements. How do the ten pages achieve what they do? Why should anyone notice, or care? Before addressing this, in fairness let’s look at T...

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