Thoughts on J.D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is a masterpiece of modern literature, a coming of age novel that influenced millions of young adults around the world. The death of Salinger at 91 three years ago this month has prompted some reflections on the author’s most famous work, and about the author himself.

At 17, I read Catcher and was moved by Holden Caulfield’s pessimistic attitude and general disillusionment with the world. Here was a fictional character that understood the fears and anxieties of growing up in a world full of contradictions and phoniness. The novel spoke to me on many levels, as no other novel had before.

A year before Salinger’s death, I re-read Catcher and had a much different reaction to it than I did as a teenager. This time around, Holden comes across as confused and mistrustful. Who could blame him? His parents had withdrawn from him emotionally after the death of Holden’s brother. They sent him away to a private school, where he felt abandoned. A teacher at school makes a pass at him (or so Holden thinks), at a time when young Holden desperately needs reassurance in his life.

With the benefit of 30-plus years and maturity behind me, I found myself pitying Holden, rather than identifying with him. This is a teenager who has some serious issues and needs professional help, but his method of coping (although amusing in fiction) is to remove himself from life and criticize everyone and everything that he doesn’t agree with or understand.

Holden’s central themes in Catcher – adults aren’t to be trusted, running away from problems, avoiding contact with people – are exactly the wrong messages that young people need to hear. Teenagers and young adults need encouragement, feedback and involvement. They need to engage with the world, not run away from it.

As for Salinger, the author, he walked away from fame at the height of his popularity; he hasn’t published anything since 1965. The publishing world has been obsessing over his silence ever since. The author’s reclusive lifestyle seems to have been an extension of Holden Caulfied’s; in other words, when the going gets rough, walk away. Salinger apparently felt like a circus clown in promoting his work, and so he chose a life of self-imposed exile from the world of letters.

In Salinger’s case, he could afford to walk away from publishing, but this decision always struck me as odd. Writers are, by their very nature, introverted and prone to isolation. They spend most of their time alone, away from crowds. But you’d think that going on book tours and meeting fans would be a welcome relief from the solitary nature of the writing profession.

The work Salinger left behind is what’s important, though. The Catcher in the Rye, along with a handful of excellent short stories, will be read for generations. Salinger was a gifted writer who understood the struggles and frustrations associated with becoming an adult.

As for that pile of unpublished manuscripts that Salinger is rumoured to have left behind, who knows if it’s true. If he did leave a few novels in a safe, and his estate allows them to be published, there’s no guarantee that they are any good. Perhaps Salinger had nothing left to say, as Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities) suggested in an Esquire article published in the 1980s.

In any case, the Salinger story seems far from over. But my message to young readers is that engagement with the world is better than giving up on it. It’s easy to become disillusioned when things aren’t going your way. It’s much harder to put your difficulties aside and press on with confidence and hope. 

Readers should not look to Caulfield (or to Salinger) for life lessons. Read and enjoy Salinger’s works, but don’t pattern your life after him or his fictional alter ego.

Thomas Cromwell: a kingmaker and king without a throne

Wolf Hall

A Novel by Hilary Mantel

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. (2009)

Historical fiction isn’t usually on my preferred reading list, but with all of the glowing reviews and literary awards for Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, I had to see what all the fuss was about.

In Wolf Hall, there is considerable fuss over politics, religion and Henry VIII’s all-consuming aspiration to produce a male heir. Mantel weaves many storylines into this fine tapestry, but the main story is of Thomas Cromwell and his rise from poverty to one of the most powerful men in England at that time.

The story begins with a severe beating the young Cromwell takes at the hands of his abusive father, a beating that soon leads to his running away from home and learning to survive on his own. Cromwell not only survives, but thrives, using his quick wit and street smarts, eventually learning several languages, developing key business contacts, becoming a lawyer and ingratiating himself into the good graces of the powerful Cardinal Wosley, and later Henry VIII.

Here we are presented with a Cromwell who is calculating and restrained; an influential power broker who prefers working behind the scenes on behalf of his powerful patrons. He is prudent, cunning, manipulative, patient, resourceful and ambitious. In his dealings with priests, ambassadors and royalty, Cromwell comes across as more of efficient administrator than a brutish henchman.

Cromwell’s story is all the more intriguing because it occurs during one of the most transformative epochs in English history, a time when priests, scholars and laypeople everywhere were starting to question the Christian interpretation of the Bible. This is an age in which being caught with an English translation of the Bible (or questioning its teachings) often led to imprisonment, torture and death.

It was also an age when Henry VIII’s patience with Rome was beginning to wear thin. The King resented the Church’s vast wealth and land holdings in England, and the money that continuously flowed from England into Rome’s coffers. He especially resented the Pope’s refusal to grant him an annulment or a divorce from Katherine so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, who would hopefully bear him a son.

Mantel is a skillful, assured writer who manages to advance her various plot-lines with great bravado. Her writing is elegant, poetic and subtle. In a novel with such breadth, dozens of characters swiftly enter and exit the stage, sometimes too swiftly. Occasionally, I found it a challenge keeping track of who was speaking to whom, and whose thoughts were being explored (a cast of characters at the start serves as a handy reference).

At her best, Mantel demonstrates a great skill in describing the political and religious tensions of the time, and in understanding her characters and their motivations. Here is a guarded Cromwell during one of his early encounters with Henry VIII, trying to surmise what makes the King tick:

 He is startled. Then he understands. Henry wants a conversation on any topic. One that’s nothing to do with love, or hunting, or war. Now that Wolsey’s gone, there not much scope for it; unless you want to talk to a priest of some stripe. And if you send for a priest, what does it come back to? To love; to Anne: and what you want and can’t have.

Wolf Hall covers a lot of ground in this sweeping novel, and Mantel successfully brings to life the many personalities, feuds, jealousies, intrigues and tensions that characterize this fascinating period of English history. At the centre of all this political and religious upheaval, and influencing the course of history, is a confident Thomas Cromwell, a sort of kingmaker and king without a throne.

Adopting a Google mindset is good for business

What Would Google Do?

By Jeff Jarvis

Published by HarperCollins, 2009

Jeff Jarvis is a journalist, editor, and a professor at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. He publishes a popular blog called Buzz Machine, about news and media trends. Readers may remember Jarvis as the blogger who made headlines a few years ago, when he publicly called out Dell Computers for its poor customer service.

In What Would Google Do? Jarvis has written about how Google (the world’s most popular search engine) has transformed the advertising industry and how it has affected other industries as well. The main premise of the book is an attempt to get companies (and industries) to understand the Google mindset, and to recognize the power of the individual in this age of open sourcing, mobile computing and social networking.

In a networked world, it’s all about the customer. More importantly, it’s about empowering customers to talk freely about your products and services. It’s about giving customers choices about where and how and what they buy. In my industry, advertising, Google has literally turned business models upside down, forcing newspapers, magazines and ad agencies to re-invent themselves.

With the advent of Google AdWords (a pay-per-click advertising model), advertisers now have the ability to target customers, based on viewing habits and website content. AdWords offers advertisers the option of paying for ads only when customers click on their links, a far more cost-effective (and profitable) advertising model than purchasing ads with traditional media.

In this new age of advertising, it’s no longer about sending messages en masse, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. Now it’s all about targeting customers by age, demographics, interests, etc. “Advertisers are starting to mouth the right words – it’s about relationships, not messages,” writes Jarvis.

Jarvis doesn’t confine his observations to the advertising industry. He includes chapters on utilities, retail, manufacturing, automotive and financial services. He discusses how the Google mindset is changing those industries, by making companies more approachable, transparent and accountable.

Whatever business or enterprise you’re involved in, What Would Google Do? is an engaging read that will help you to better understand the power of the individual in today’s networked world. It may even inspire you to re-think current business practices and change the way you do business.

Although What Would Google Do? was published in 2009 (light years in the digital age), the themes discussed in this book are just as relevant today as they were four years ago. 

Tripping through Vegas with Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

A Savage Journey To The Heart of the American Dream

By Hunter S. Thompson,

Originally published by Random House Inc. 1972

This book has been on my must-read list for years, and now that I’ve finished it, I can say it’s been worth the wait. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a strange and curious book that belongs to an era in American culture that was summed up in Timothy Leary’s famous phrase, “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

Part memoir, part reportage and part travelogue, Fear and Loathing is Hunter S. Thompson’s (1937 - 2005) attempt to examine American attitudes towards drugs, money, success and failure in the glitzy heart of Las Vegas. To a large extent, the story is also a myth-building exercise for Thompson, who (as I understand it) regularly cast himself as a renegade in his non-fiction tales and in his life as well.

The story starts off with Thompson being sent to Las Vegas in 1971 to cover the Mint 400 car race featuring motorcycles and dune buggies. Thompson descends on Vegas in a red Chevrolet convertible, accompanied by a friend (his attorney), along with an ample stash of drugs, including marijuana, mescaline, LSD, uppers, downers, ether and tequila. The pair of miscreants stumble around town, stoned out of their minds, laying waste to hotel suites, cars, casinos, bars, credit cards and anyone unlucky enough to stand in their way. How they avoided being arrested and thrown in jail is one of the unexplained mysteries of this zany tale.

On the heels of the short-lived Mint 400 assignment, as he’s leaving Vegas, Thompson is given another assignment to stay in town to cover the National District Attorneys’ Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The ironies of a drug-addled journalist reporting on a drug conference were as thick as the marijuana smoke that seeps from the pages of this thin book. Thompson’s encounter with the maid in his hotel room, where he pretends to be a detective, is worth the price of the book alone.

Thompson’s writing style is anything but linear. He writes in a choppy, stream of consciousness narrative, flitting from scene to scene with the attention span of a crack addict.  Wherever the action is, that’s where Thompson is, too; he inserts himself willy-nilly as a protagonist in most of the scenes, as did Tom Wolfe in many of his brilliant essays from the 1960s and ‘70s. Thompson and Wolfe were pioneers of a writing style dubbed the New Journalism, where authors adopt techniques of the novel into their reporting.

In Fear and Loathing, Thompson is capable of good, clear writing, and there are passages that jump off the page in their ability to enlighten and entertain the reader.  For all of his rambling, erratic prose, you have to hand it to Thompson: his drunken, drugged-out escapades make for some colourful prose, and his observations on cultural trends are as sharp as a tack:

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning….And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory of the forces of Good and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…. 

My final verdict on Fear and Loathing was that it was quick, amusing and quite funny at times. Despite a narrative that often meanders, and the author’s propensity for ingesting enough drugs and alcohol that would kill other mere mortals, Fear and Loathing successfully recreates a time when America was struggling to understand drug culture and the decade that gave rise to it.

Elmore Leonard hits a bullseye with Killshot

Killshot

A novel by Elmore Leonard

(1989, William Morrow and Company, Inc.)

Elmore Leonard has been writing novels since the 1950s and is widely considered to be America’s pre-eminent crime novelist. After reading only my second Leonard novel, Killshot, it’s easy to see why he is held in such high esteem.

In Killshot, we meet a hired hit man nicknamed Blackbird (aka The Bird), who is sent from Toronto to Detroit to kill an aging mobster. After the hit, things get interesting. The Bird meets up with a not-too-bright ex-con, Richie Nix, who is about to extort $10,000 from a Michigan realtor. The plan quickly goes awry, and The Bird and Richie find themselves in deadly pursuit of the man who thwarted their plans.

Leonard is an absolute master of dialogue and fast-paced action, and in Killshot, he depicts a world that is seedy, desperate and violent, a place where hit men and ex-cons move comfortably from one act of violence to another. But with Leonard, acts of violence are a means of advancing the plot and are often infused with elements of black humour. Here is Richie holding up a convenience store:

The trick now was to do both almost at once. Richie raised the shotgun high enough to aim it at the girl and saw her drop the magazine as he said, ‘This’s your big day, honey. Empty out that cash drawer for me in a paper bag and set it on the counter. And some gum. Gimme a few packs of that bubble gum, too.’

Richie is always chewing gum and blowing bubbles, a characteristic that adds a comic element to his psychopathic nature. He also spends a good deal of time jabbering away and getting under the Bird’s skin. The uneasy relationship between these two outsiders is fraught with tension, laughter, and suspense.

But it’s not just the criminals and misfits that Leonard portrays so brilliantly. The two characters drawn into this bizarre plot, Wayne and Carmen Colson, are a middle-aged married couple on the straight and narrow, who work hard and love each other, but who are drawn into a deadly cat and mouse game against their will.  Wayne and Carmen are forced into survival mode to elude their trackers, and as the story unfolds, the chemistry between them is just as full of subtlety and nuance as the chemistry between the Bird and Richie.

The pacing of Killshot is quick and frenetic. Leonard is great at building suspense through non-stop action and concise dialogue. For anyone who has not read Elmore Leonard, Killshot is a great place to start. This novel demonstrates the author’s skill at developing believable characters and throwing them into circumstances that are beyond their control, with tragic-comic results.

It’s definitely worth a read.

Lincoln: A Man Who Belongs To The Ages

Team of Rivals, The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

 by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2006, Simon and Shuster Paperbacks)

In Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin presents a complete portrait of one of the most enduring and captivating figures in American political life, a politician who played a hugely significant role in shaping American history and its way of life for generations.

Goodwin does a marvelous job developing the story of Lincoln’s life and circumstances, starting from his impoverished upbringing in rural Kentucky to his career as a circuit lawyer in Illinois to his eventual election to public office and the Presidency. But it’s Lincoln’s term as President that provides the most compelling aspects of this book, a period when competing political factions were at work leading up to, and during, the Civil War.

In these pages, Lincoln is presented as a compassionate, rational, well-spoken and eminently likable man, a political aspirant who appears awkward and fumbling at times, but whose deep humanity and purity of heart eventually win over skeptics and opponents. He’s a man who holds the highest hopes for himself and his fledgling nation and never loses faith when the going gets rough. As the title suggests, this book also explores the lives of Lincoln’s contemporaries, including his chief political rivals and adversaries, some of whom would go on to become members of his Cabinet and close confidants.

Goodwin demonstrates historical writing at its best, meaning at its most accessible. The tone of this book is formal, straightforward and measured. She draws upon vast resources of personal letters, diaries, correspondence, newspapers reports and government archives to give an almost play-by-play account of Lincoln and the people close to him during this turbulent and divisive period in American life, when slavery and secession threatened to tear the Union apart.

All of the key moments in Lincoln’s life (his election to the Illinois General Assembly, his winning the Presidency, his marriage to Mary Todd, the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, The Gettysburg Cemetery Address) are rendered with a sharp and unbiased eye; these important moments are made all the more riveting with Goodwin’s talent at weaving multiple narratives into the mix.   

Throughout Team of Rivals, I was fascinated by the sheer volume of correspondence among politicians, soldiers, generals, civil leaders and socialites. Everybody was writing letters and keeping diaries and angling to be heard. I was also intrigued by various modes and speed of communication in the mid 19^th century. For instance, during Lincoln’s inaugural Presidential address in 1860, it took seven days (via pony express) for a transcript of the address to reach the west coast so that newspapers in California could report on it. To demonstrate how starved people were for information back then, Lincoln would spend countless hours in the Washington telegraph office, anxiously awaiting the latest news from the battlefields.

A final thought about Team of Rivals is how effective Goodwin is at fleshing out Lincoln the man. Abraham Lincoln was a man who loved his family and friends; and who loved his work and his country. He was a man who aspired to the highest principles of human conduct, both in and out of office. At the conclusion of this book, I was reminded of a quote by Aristotle: "Do not listen to those who exhort you to keep to modest human thoughts.  No.  Live, instead, according to the highest thing in you. For small though it may be in power and worth, it is high above the rest."

Lincoln did live modestly and unpretentiously, but his thoughts, ideas and dreams were of a higher order than most. In Team of Rivals, those hopes and dreams – and the man’s great legacy – remain firmly intact and will continue to inspire.

Rolling Stone’s backstage pass to Led Zeppelin

Rolling Stone Collectors Edition

Led Zeppelin, The Ultimate Guide to Their Music & Legend

During the 1970s, Led Zeppelin was the definitive heavy metal group of the 1970s, a band that attained legendary status among its millions of devoted followers (myself included). In this Collectors Edition, Rolling Stone has reached into its archives and chosen a series of feature articles, interviews, photographs and album guides to create a compelling and highly readable tribute.

Although this Edition is primarily aimed at hard-core Led Zeppelin fans, it would appeal to any rock fan (casual or hard-core) interested in knowing about the group’s roots and what contributed to its enormous worldwide success.

For me, Led Zeppelin was always about the music, and less about the band’s often-reported antics and excesses on the road. Whether it was a hard-driving number like “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” a melodic ballad like “Thank You” or an audacious experimental piece like “Kashmir,” Zeppelin boldly went where no band had gone before.

In these pages, both Robert Plant and Jimmy Page come across as sensitive, passionate and articulate when discussing their respective musical styles and influences. Here’s Jimmy Page speaking to journalist Cameron Crowe in a RS interview from 1975: 

“The term ‘genius’ gets used far too loosely in rock & roll. When you hear the melodic structures of what classical musicians put together and you compare it to that of a rock & roll record, there’s a hell of a long way rock & roll has to go. There’s a certain standard in classical music that allows the application of the term ‘genius,’ but you’re treading on thin ice if you start applying it to rock & rollers. The way I see it, rock & roll is folk music. Street music. It isn’t taught in school. It has to be picked up. You don’t find geniuses in street musicians, but that doesn’t mean to say you can’t be really good. You get as much out of rock & roll artistically as you put into it. There’s nobody who can teach you. You’re on your own, and that’s what I find so fascinating about it.”

For Led Zeppelin, it was all about the musical innovation and following their bliss, at least in the recording studio and during their live performances. This was no pop band intent on repeating formulaic tunes with every new album. Rather, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham and John Paul Jones were virtuoso performers who wanted to reinvent themselves all the time; they seem not to have cared about achieving top 40 status on any playlist (indeed, the band’s most famous song, Stairway to Heaven, was never released as a single). 

For Zeppelin fans, it was about immersing yourself in the experience: listening to “Zeppelin IV” or “Physical Graffiti” in a friend’s basement or in the car. The music was bold, rapacious, rebellious, sexual and subversive. If you were listening to Zeppelin, you were probably engaging in other recreational pursuits that parents disapproved of. Zeppelin spoke to a generation that wasn't ready to cut its hair and punch a clock. The band had attitude and the talent to back it up, and that was a large part of its appeal. Zep was going to do things its way, and to hell with what anybody thought.

For those young enough to have enjoyed Led Zeppelin during the band’s prime, this Collectors Edition will evoke memories of time spent listening to a band that became synonymous with the 1970s counter-culture. For those who weren’t around back then, the publication will provide a thrilling snapshot of the life and times of one of the most creative, versatile and influential rock bands of all time.