Double shot

That's right, two posts in one night. Can you handle it? Good.

I recently finished re-reading Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters which, along with Franny & Zooey, are my favorite works of his. Salinger, of course, caught the literary world's attention with A Catcher in the Rye, a book that had an edge. These other two works, though, don't. There is some rising action in F&Z and there is certainly some tension in Carpenters, but nothing like the edge of Catcher.

While this blog primarily exists to shame myself into writing, it is also a place where I consider the practice of writing. To this end, I highly respect Salinger in F&Z and Carpenters especially, because he writes with a handicap. He refuses to play to the readers' baser desires. Sex. Violence. Explosions. Aliens/Vampires. Not here. If there's a cop, it's because a character needs to know how much longer a parade is going to hold up traffic. Amen.

By today's standards, I doubt he could have started his career with anything but Catcher. It grabbed peoples' attention and built him a following. After that, he slyly worked Eastern philosophy and detachment into Western literature, moving away from Holden Caulfield to Seymour Glass.

Neither of my first two books eschew edge. I'm not at the point where I can do that. I do, though, look forward to that book.