It's kind of, you know, ghoulish, I know, but what I want to know is: Did Mr. Salinger, uh, you know, leave anything for us?

J. D. Salinger (1919-2010)

This just in from The Borowitz Report:

Hollywood Eager to Finally Fuck Up 'Catcher in the Rye'
Producers Scramble to Wreck Masterpiece

HOLLYWOOD (The Borowitz Report) – Just hours after author J.D. Salinger passed away at his New Hampshire home on Wednesday, Hollywood studios were already salivating at the chance to finally ruin his masterpiece, Catcher in the Rye.

“If we are fortunate enough to acquire the rights to Mr. Salinger’s book, we pledge to stay faithful to the spirit of Catcher in the Rye,” said Dougy Binstock, a producer at Columbia Pictures. “And the best way to do that is by producing it as a rock opera.”

But even as Mr. Binstock was bidding for the rights to produce a film he hopes to call Phantom of the Rye, Mindy Hammerfur, an executive at Paramount Pictures, said she thought Salinger's book was “seriously in need of a reboot.”

“We never find out in the book how Holden Caulfield becomes the catcher in the rye,” said Ms. Hammerfur. “The movie really needs to be kind of a prequel.”

But of all the potential bidders hoping to desecrate Catcher in the Rye, Avatar director James Cameron may have the inside track.

“I loved this book as a boy and I’m not going to change a thing,” Mr. Cameron said, “except for adding blue space-cats.”

by Ken

I admit it. Since I heard word of J. D. Salinger's death, I've been waiting to hear whether, in accord with one's fondest hopes, he left behind a heap of unpublished manuscripts. The fantasy is that, all these years when he was refusing to publish anything, he was nevertheless writing up a storm.

I really don't expect so. Just from what I know about him and his reclusive life, which is the same little as most everyone else, it really does seem that he lost the desire or will or need, or maybe just had nothing more to say.

I seem to be the only Salinger fan walking whose adolescence wasn't shaped by Catcher in the Rye. I wonder if it would have made a difference if I'd read it when I was apparently supposed to. I don't think so. I felt quite enough the outsider, and I don't think Holden Caulfield's version would have much intersected with mine. I'm sure just knowing how "in" Holden's version of alienation was alienated me, and contributed to putting me off the book until much later.

It's a pretty good book, I'll admit, but I'm not sure I understand what the fuss is about, and I can't help thinking that the difficulty of living with the attention and living up to the acclaim it brought its author had a lot to do with eventually paralyzing him as a writer. In any case, I wonder how many adolescents have achieved the life wisdom to appreciate Salinger's eerie ear for the rhythms of life and memory.

Which may be the fascination of the Glass family, so fastidiously chronicled in J.D.S.'s assorted other fictions. The young Glasses were all saddled with that premature wisdom, and on the whole it usually seemed to make a misery of their otherwise enviable and fascinating lives. It's not Catcher but the fastidious chronicles of the Glasses which grabbed me.

I care a lot more about Seymour, the doomed eldest of the junior Glasses, than I ever did about my own older brother. Over the years, my increasingly tatty old paperback copy of the volume that contains the stories "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: An Introduction" would periodically rise to the surface of my clutter. (Not the other books, for some reason, just that one. I'm led to wonder whether I still have my copies of the other books.) And every time I dipped into it, the spell was soon cast again. And fascinated as I was and am by the younger siblings, it always seems to come back, for me as for them, to Seymour, so full of potential and future hopes, yet with, in reality, no future ahead of him.

For starters, I always hoped Salinger would enable us to understand why Seymour was doomed. Of course, it could be that the author had already had his fill of those damned precious Glasses and was relieved to be able to cast them off. Or could he perhaps not get beyond Seymour Glass's futurelessness either?

While we await final word from the Salinger estate about what the writer may have left for us, I guess I'm lucky in that it's been quite a while since I last took in the entirety of the Salinger "canon." So perhaps the sensible course now is just to pony up the current asking price for those precious few books and revisit them all. I wonder what even Catcher will look like to me at this remove from his and my time.

Unless, of course, there's new stuff coming.

#