Seymour

I've been struggling coming up with a way of summarizing such a unique book. It's really not a book at all, more just a collection of J.D. Salinger's musings on his older brother, Seymour. It's sort of one of those books you love or you hate. I loved it. J.D.S. is hilarious and smart and, amazingly, manages to depict his emotions without turning the book into a cry-fest. It was great. Since I can't seem to come up with a good way of summing it up, here's some quotes that might do the trick. I had quite a few favorites.

Most of these quotes are being directed straight to the reader from the writer.

• "You'll deny it up and down, I fear, but I'm really in no position to take your word for it. you're a great bird-lover."
• I feel, at least, that I know him-you-quite well enough to guess what kind of well-meant gesture might be welcomed from me right now. In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant, before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I'm sure, the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should or shouldn't do with our poor little sex organs, all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don't shut me up) Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped- before we join these others, I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I'm afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((())))."
• "Professionally speaking, which is the only way I've ever really enjoyed speaking up (and, just to ingratiate myself still less, I speak nine languages, incessantly, four of them stone-dead)-professionally speaking, I repeat, I'm an ecstatically happy man."
• "To the point: I happen to know, possibly none better, that an ecstatically happy writing person is often a totally draining type to have around"
• "In the wake of anything as large and consuming as happiness, he necessarily forfeits the much smaller but, for a writer, always rather exquisite pleasure of appearing on the page serenely sitting on a fence. Worst of all, I think, he's no longer in a position to look after the reader's most immediate want; namely, to see the author get the hell on with his story."
• "I'm aware that a good many perfectly intelligent people can't purportedly being told. (We're advised of these things by mail-mostly, granted, by thesis preparers with very natural, oaty urges to write us under the table in their off-campus time. But we read, and usually we believe; good, bad, or indifferent, any string of English words holds our attention as if it came from Prospero himself.)"
• "(My brother, for the record, had a distracting habit, most of his adult life, of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger, clearing all the cigarette ends to the sides-smiling from ear to ear as he did it-as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle, and he never looked disappointed.)"
• "On the other hand, in the earlier, much shorter story I did, back in the late forties, he not only appeared in the flesh but walked, talked, went for a dip in the ocean, and fired a bullet through his brain in the last paragraph."
• "For this Semitic-Celtic Oriental I need a spanking-new paragraph."
• "I argued her down, and I'm prepared, frankly, to argue you down, too, if necessary."
• "I pause, of coarse, to give the reader a chance to throw up his hands, or, more likely, to wash them of the whole lot of us."
• "Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)"
• "I would to God the reader had something terrible to tell me first. (Oh, you out there- with your enviable golden silence.)"
• "You can't imagine what big, hand-rubbing plans I had for this immediate space."
• "I'm not exactly wallowing in guilt at the moment, but guilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain-its roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge."
• "I worry about big jumps that I can measure off with my eyes. I think I dream of your daring to jump right out of my sight. Excuse this. I'm writing very fast now."
• "Along about the third wakeful night in a row, he'd look up at least once from whatever he was doing to ask me if I felt a terrible draft. (No one in our family, not even Seymour, felt drafts. Only terrible drafts.)"
• "(Pool I'll have to discuss another time. It wasn't just a game with us, it was almost a protestant reformation. We shot pool before or after almost every important crisis of our young manhood.)"
• "'How can it be luck if I aim?' I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. 'Because it will be,' he said. 'You'll be glad if you hit his marble--Ira's marble--won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.'"

See more reviews or buy Seymour at Amazon.com.