|
Does
your dad drink his own urine? Does he consider a piece of cheese
a full meal? Does he sleep with teenage girls and let them move
in with you? Is he a recluse? Has he written books that have inspired
lunatics to kill hippie-love rock stars? No matter how badly you
think you had it, Margaret A. Salinger can beat you. Her
dad is the creator of Holden Caulfield. Try living with that one.
It is hard enough to grow up without having your father be a giant
on the literary scene, a sensitive auteur so marked by the constant
and inalienable traumas he suffered at the hands of his adoring
and equally sensitive public that he moved to New Hampshire, living
like Boo Radley in an old house with wives and the occasional girlfriend
and a medicine chest full of herbal remedies designed to stave off
the horrors of aging. J. D. Salinger, author of THE CATCHER IN THE
RYE, the man who wrote the most classic tale of alienation and teenage
angst in American letters, is no mere ghost. Margaret, a basketball-loving
girl who didn't think of her dad as some remarkable cultural icon,
has now written a simple and almost balanced tome to the man who
sired her.
Starting with the rampant anti-Semitism that her half-Jewish father's
family faced before and after WW II, she chronicles the life of
the mind that her father found as well as the life of the heart,
semi-faithful but never sentimental, that he found with her mother.
Although the marriage produced both Margaret and her brother Matthew
(who made a run at actor stardom in the '80s), it did not last,
and Margaret blames dear old dad and his large cast of eccentricities
for the divorce. Then there is her own life with dad, none too pretty
or happy, and her strange relationship with her mother to dwell
upon --- neither seems to have brought her anything but angst.
Coming on the heels of another Salinger memoir, this time penned
by former teen wunderkind/girlfriend/object of emotional abuse Joyce
Maynard (who offers that Salinger taught her how to throw up her
food after every meal he deigned "unhealthy," thus causing her anorexia),
it is interesting to get Margaret's perspective on Dad's choice
of paramours. She remembers Maynard as a pathetic young woman whom
she could not get close to, nor did she want to; and she recounts
her horror at finding out that the skinny little writer and the
tall old writer had consummated their weird union on her own bed.
It's one of the few moments where she doesn't find some interesting
context for Dad's actions --- usually, as if trying to convince
herself that maybe Salinger wasn't always a scary guy, she tries
to explain away his behavior.
Margaret isn't a bad writer herself. She doesn't really let her
father off the hook for all the absurdities through which they've
passed together. And yet she doesn't seem to hate him. Nor does
she seem to think that Dad really hates her for doing this. And
she believes that even when you grow up in the arena of an artistic
genius you still have a hard time understanding the people who brought
you into this world and thus have to suffer in order to find yourself.
In the end, Margaret A. Salinger could be any dysfunctional family
member in the world. DREAM CATCHER (get it --- "Catcher" in the
title) grabs onto the myths about the famous man and rips them to
shreds, for our own entertainment and Margaret's obvious attempts
at sanity. If it takes you longer than an hour to finish this book,
well, you're a big "phony," as Holden Caulfield would say.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
|
