Just not my taste

Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger (Little, Brown, 1961)

I've been doing things like re-reading Emma and find other ways to play with my Kindle. And that's gotten in the way of reading books that could really appear on this blog. But then I returned to Salinger.

I guess these are two short (long?) stories that form a sort of novella. And early in the first, about Franny, I could see why Catcher in the Rye works so well in high school. For all I hated that book, Salinger writes in a highly readable style. The pages turn quickly, and such was the case here. He does an excellent job of painting the moneyed classes, with their clothing and rituals and manners of speech. And then places black sheep within them, who can call out their hypocrisy and phoniness and just generally complain. In the case of Franny Glass, this crisis takes the form of a nervous breakdown; for brother Zooey, it's some sort of complaint both about the ridiculous world around him and of the melodrama of his sister's response.

Or something. I'm really open to the idea that I'm getting Salinger wrong. Maybe it comes from the same well from which springs the truism that we most dislike in others that which we abhor in ourselves? Perhaps my complete and total impatience with the ways in which Salinger's protagonists place themselves apart and somehow better than those around them comes from the fact that I do the same. Maybe I see too much of myself in Holden and Franny, and I don't like what I see.

Or maybe not. So that's the thing I give Salinger. I remain annoyed when reading him, and haven't grown out of that teenage pique, but by provoking that response he also inspires a lot of introspection. The struggle to figure out what I don't like is almost more valuable as an exercise merely reading a book I enjoyed.

Every five years

The Red Book - Deborah Copaken Kogan (Hyperion, 2012)

This is one of those books that I sort of can't get enough of (and clearly I'm not alone): a certain of friends who went to an elite college or university, and how their lives are turning out X years down the road. But I am probably close to burning out on them, so I picked up this book with some amount of skepticism.

And then it blew my expectations out of the water. (Yay!)

The Red Book is Harvard's version of the Class Books that come out every five years around reunion time. And if you've ever had to do one, you know how hard it is to sum up your life and present it in its best light when you know your page will be surrounded my those of your classmates who won Olympic medals and founded start-ups and joined Doctors Without Borders, etc. .... while at the same time maintaining a cool and self-effacing humility about the whole thing. The Class Book is just a bunch of #humblebrag on steroids.

And that's sort of what this novel is about, or at least the framing device. Addison, Mia, Clover, and Jane are in town for their 20th reunion. And we start with their red book pages and then learn the truth that hides behind those pages. And we see other alumni pages too, as their lives intersect with the four characters. Our omniscient narrator also gets into the minds of an ex-boyfriend, a couple teenage children, one character's husband (who I found almost absurdly likable), and possibly more. It also teases the future, and it is sometimes reassuring to have a narrator say that "years later" a character will look back on a moment, since the "now" of the book is 2009, and the book came out in 2012. Even right now, we're just heading into the characters' 25th reunion.

Maybe it's just that the novel was so readable. And while the characters weren't always likable, they were mostly sympathetic, and that felt real to me. And even the melodrama of the plot (and boy is there plenty of it) seemed reasonable in the context of the storytelling. So thank you, Deborah Copaken Kogan, for a very pleasant surprise.