On placing Salinger into the mid-century Jewish American literary canon:

One potential place to “put” Salinger would be with the other American Jewish male writers who came to prominence in the 1950s and ’60s—authors like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, who’ve come to define an era in American Jewish literature. Up to a point, this makes sense: like various among them, Salinger served in and wrote about World War II and critiqued the culture of the American boom times that followed. Like them, he masterfully combined elements of high and low art, a practice that since then has become almost synonymous with the American aesthetic. And like them, his work was frequently animated by a quarrel with the religious affiliation of his youth. But—and this slight distinction makes all the difference—he was picking a different fight with Jewishness. It had nothing to do with the strangulations of insular community life, or the struggle to move beyond immigrant parents and become American, or to move beyond a castrating old-world mother and become a man. Salinger’s assimilated, upper-middle-class characters don’t have to worry about these things; in fact, Franny and Zooey Glass and their five siblings—his most Jewishly identified characters—are, like Salinger himself, technically only half-Jewish. The specter of intermarriage (or, to put it in more Rothian terms, the possibility of banging shiksas) isn’t a taboo-smashing fantasy, here; it’s a very comfortable fact.

Salinger’s quarrel with Jewishness was about structures of thought that are much less visible and less risible than the clannishness of immigrants: he objects to the premiums placed on education, analysis, intelligence itself. The Glass family stories concern the attempt of seven brilliant siblings to escape from brilliance—and, in particular, from the psychoanalytic thought that permeated Jewish intellectual life at the time. If Alex Portnoy visits his Dr. Spielvogel in an attempt to cure himself of the strangulating effects of parochial Jewish community, the Glass children turn to eastern religion to escape the limitations of a world where everyone sees an analyst.

Posted by Laura at February 6, 2010 10:31 PM