I was just reading an interesting, although not particularly enlightening, article about J.D. Salinger.
J.D. Salinger 1919-2010
The gist of the article was whether or not he had unpublished works lying around the house when he died, two years ago at the age of 91, and if so, are they any good. Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, and that’s what he’s known for. Literary types rate the Franny and Zooey stories highly, but outside of literary types nobody’s ever read them. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was a kind of a boring story about an upper class pervert.
I suspect that the reason his widow and his son haven’t released any of his works posthumously is because there’s nothing to release. He wrote a lot, by all reports – even as he walked around town, he could be seen jotting things down in notebooks – but that doesn’t mean it ever amounted to completed stories or novels. He was mostly known, in the last 40 or so years of his life, for being kind of weird and reclusive.
I Loved Catcher in the Rye, though. It’s O.K. for an author, or a musician, to be a one hit wonder. That’s enough. And it will probably have to be.
Joseph Heller wrote one great book (Catch 22) and probably should have stopped there. I got a couple of chapters into “Something Happened” and said to myself, yeah, something happened. You forgot how to write.
Ken Kesey wrote two great books (“Sometimes a Great Notion” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and then retired to a ranch in Idaho, saying two was enough. He did come out of retirement with one book later in life, but it was embarrassingly bad. Not only had he slipped as a writer, he no longer even had enough sense of self-awareness to know that what he’d written truly sucked.
Not every great writer can be, or should be, like John Grisham or Terry Pratchett. Not every writer is meant to churn ’em out.
If I am ever fortunate enough to write something half as good as Catcher in the Rye, I will be damned proud of my life’s work.
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