Pajiba

i know i say this all the time, but...

if Sabrina likes it, SO DO I!

Actually, "Bananafish" is just as full of philosophical blather as the rest of them -- it's a meditation on Buddhism hidden behind the use of numbers throughout the story and the dialogue with the little girl. I suppose it's just Salinger's way of moving the spoon around while making airplane sounds to get you to eat your vegetables.

With Salinger, I sometimes just tune out the philosophical blather and focus on the writing. He has a beautiful way of phrasing sentences, I think, and that (not any plot) is what makes 9 Stories so wonderful. Take For Esme, with Love and Squalor: Yes, it is funny in places and it can evoke exhaustion in me no matter how many times I read it. But Salinger's use of language creates individual voices for the characters, sets a separate tone for each part of the story, and sounds lovely when read aloud. The writing style is, I believe, what you have neglected to notice here (as well as in Franny and Zoe and Catcher) that is so crucial to Salinger's work.

Sorry for the somewhat pedantic post -- I just started writing, and it happened.

C'mon - Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut rocks. "I was a nice girl...wasn't I?"

Duuuuude, "Teddy" is only obnoxious if you believe that Salinger is writing fully in the camp of the little boy, and I don't think he is. The story is just brimming with ambiguities. I think it's pretty amazing.

Really...no love for 'Raise High the Roofbeam Oh Carpenter and Seymour an Introduction'? To me those two companion pieces are by far the crowning achievement of Salinger. They're the pieces that tie the Glass family so perfectly together and make Buddy Glass, possibly, one of the best narrative voices ever created. You're sucked into the romantic view of one younger sibling towards his elder. A profound connection that most people don't realize until siblings have lost connection with one another. Salinger manages to capture the small moments between siblings that are often, at the time inconsequential, but appear, later in life, to be the most endearing moments of childhood.

Then, about a block further on, I picked up the sound of pursuit at my rear, plainly conducted on foot. My first, perhaps typically New Yorkese thought was that the cops were after me - the charge, conceivably, Breaking Speed Records on a Non-School-Zone Street. I strained to get a little more speed out of my body, but it was no use. I felt a hand clutch out at me and grab hold of my sweater just where the winning-team numerals should have been, and, good and scared, I broke my speed with the awkwardness of a gooney bird coming to a stop. My pursuer was, of course, Seymour, and lie was looking pretty damned scared himself. 'What's the matter? What happened?' he asked me frantically. He was still holding on to my sweater. I yanked myself loose from his hand and informed him, in the rather scatological idiom of the neighborhood, which I won't record here verbatim, that nothing had happened, nothing was the matter, that I was just running, for cryin' out loud. His relief was prodigious. 'Boy, did you scare me !' he said. 'Wow, were you moving ! I could hardly catch up with you!' We then went along, at a walk, to the drugstore together. Perhaps strangely, perhaps not strangely at all, the morale of the now Second-Fastest Boy Runner in the World had not been very perceptibly lowered.

Heh, Ren, those weren't in Nine Stories. I'll check them out, though, thanks.

"Teddy" is only obnoxious if you believe that Salinger is writing fully in the camp of the little boy

Untrue. I didn't think that.