jd salinger | House of SpeakEasy NYC

Posts From Author: jd salinger

Reading 2014

Being a collection of disordered thoughts on new writing from the last year or so. There were lots of books about books. I enjoyed Rebecca Mead‘s My Life in Middlemarch (Crown Publishing, 2014) and Joanna Rakoff‘s My Salinger Year (Knopf, 2014), which both fused literary criticism and autobiography into what Joyce Carol Oates called, reviewing Mead, “bibliomemoirs.” “The book was reading me, as I was reading it,” wrote Mead of Middlemarch, locating George Eliot’s greatness in her broad imaginative sympathies. Mead’s is a lovely book, mixing biographical detail about Eliot with an introspective analysis of how her work might be read and re-read on the journey through life (review here). Rakoff’s book, meanwhile, is more straightforwardly autobiographical, recounting the author’s first job in publishing, in which she became a sort of gatekeeper for J.D. Salinger. Until then, she’d not read him (“I was not interested in hyper-articulate seven-year-olds who quoted from the Bhagavad Gita”); but before long, she’s hooked. After a century of literary modernism, its central characters continue to haunt the pages of new work. Kevin Jackson‘s Constellation of Genius: 1922 – Modernism Year One (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) is novelly conceived, taking 1922 day by day, dropping […]

Five Reasons to Love Bret Easton Ellis Online

Does anyone know who @BretEastonEllis is?— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) April 10, 2009 It’s boring to call Bret Easton Ellis “controversial.” Yeah, American Psycho was once the subject of NOW boycotts and mock-distress middlebrow brouhaha. True, Ellis’s work traffics in the sort of content — sexual, violent, linguistic — that falls firmly into the NSFW category. And yes, his Twitter feed has often sent seismic tremors through the blogosphere, as when he compared watching Glee to stepping in “a puddle of HIV“, or when he suggested that Kathryn Bigelow was overrated “since she’s a hot woman“. Or even, come to think it, when on the occasion of J.D. Salinger’s death he proclaimed, “Party tonight!!!” (He later apologised over the Bigelow tweets in an article in The Daily Beast, admitting that they weren’t “really fun or that provocative.” Most of the time, though, he’s unequivocal.) But once all the fuss dies down — as it always does — doesn’t he sometimes have a point? To write him off is to naysay one of America’s fiercest and most insightful cultural critics. From his Empire/post-Empire theory and his passionate advocacy for grown-up moviemaking to his dismantling of political correctness and the sexy, celeb-soaked excerpts of his LA life, Ellis’s is […]

Six Degrees of John Guare

MERIWETHER [LEWIS] Never give up the enormity of this dream. Keep telling the lie. The United States will always be the last undiscovered terrain — even if we have to move the white spaces inside our head. Always hold out the promise that you can find your passage to the west, to whatever it is — love everlasting, bottomless wealth, glory — JACQUES CORNET Freedom. MERIWETHER That dream must never die. — John Guare, A Free Man of Color, Act 2 These lines, which arrive at the end of one of John Guare’s most recent plays, could be the perfect epigraph for his collected works. Desire for betterment, self-deluding ambition, holding out on a maybe: these unite Guare’s best-known characters, from Artie Shaughnessy in The House of Blue Leaves (1966) and Sally in Atlantic City (1980) to pretty much everyone in Six Degrees of Separation (1990), his most widely performed play. There are plenty of rogues in Guare’s work — con artists, thieves, drug dealers, aspiring terrorists — but they are defined less by their unsavory pursuits than their mastery of self-deception. His is a poetics of delusion. The House of Blue Leaves, which won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Obie for Best American Play […]

Redaction and Refraction in David Gilbert’s “& Sons”

“All told, or totaled, I would spend a week under A.N. Dyer’s roof, which is how I became a witness, the primary witness despite some feuding claims, to everything that happened.” So writes Philip Topping, the intrusive narrator of David Gilbert’s brilliant & Sons, near the start of the novel, which is due out in paperback from Random House on May 27. A.N. (Andrew) Dyer is an elderly, reclusive, New York-based writer in the vein of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. When we first see him, at the funeral of his lifelong friend — and Philip’s father — Charlie Topping, our narrator describes it as “one of those I-was-there moments”, a chance sighting of a rare bird, especially when the famous author stumbles over his eulogy. The majority of the novel’s action takes place in the week that follows the funeral. Philip, recently estranged from his wife, moves in with the Dyers (Andrew and his son Andy) just as the ageing patriarch summons his older children, Jamie and Richard, home from their voluntary exiles in Vermont and California. To make amends or for some darker purpose? Echoes of some of the great-slash-terrible Shakespearean fathers — notably Lear — abound as the plot […]

Don’t Throw Momma From The Train

I, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the said Joint Resolution, do hereby direct the government officials to display the United States flag on all government buildings and do invite the people of the United States to display the flag at their homes or other suitable places on the second Sunday in May as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country. So wrote President Wilson on May 9, 1914, a hundred years ago today, marking the institution of Mother’s Day in the US (read the full proclamation here). It came about through the sweat of one Anna Jarvis, moved by her own mother’s death to campaign for wider recognition of the role of mothers in society. Later, as the holiday became increasingly commercial, she came to regret her exertions and mounted a series of spirited attacks on those who sought to exploit it for profiteering or fundraising, including Eleanor Roosevelt. She lost: according to the National Geographic, Americans will spend nearly $20 billion on mom this year. According to Hallmark, it falls behind only Christmas and Valentine’s Day in terms of greetings […]