Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

Summary: Not to confuse, but Franny and Zooey goes in the very same vein as the short stories in Nine Stories and so, why not just put them in one book already? These are stories of love, family and phone calls. These stories detail the absence of love, the alienation of family and the emptiness of the telephone, the voice at the end may be your mother or your sister to whom you were so close, but now you’re just a seed on the waves of an ocean, going nowhere and slowly at that, as you sit in a musky apartment in New York, surrounded by unorganized stacks of your books.

Review: I like the implied suicide that hangs off of the last word at the end of a story. I enjoy the unreliable narrator that tells only a slice of what’s going on, filling in the blanks, and adding more tragic details of my own as I interpret the character’s motivations. I have a soft spot for these characters Salinger dreams up. They are overgrown child prodigies, shooting stars burnt out young, with nothing but the past to take joy in and such little amounts of joy. Watching the rest of their peers catch and surpass them, the young bright pupils become has-beens, forgotten by society that took such initial pride, I think everyone feels a little marginalized sometimes. I relate to these stories, the unexplainable familiarity and distance that one can feel towards family and the pace of life for someone who doesn’t really have a career or a family of their own to take care of, but doesn’t party either. It is meditative and borders on suicide on a month to month basis.

Rating (1-10): 9 stories

Favorite part: “The fact is always obvious much too late, but the singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid.” –Nine Stories p.155

“We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.” Franny and Zooey p.49

Wine-pairing: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Excellent character development. The writing makes you feel quiet when she is lonely, addled when she is manic and following her dreams in the big city makes you want to go back to a time when you could live in New York City, when the rent was reasonable and all the residents were quirky and perhaps mentally ill.