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The Stories: A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, Just Before the War with the Eskimos, The Laughing Man, Down at the Dinghy, For Esme ? With Love and Squalor, Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes, De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period, and Ted
Back Bay Books
February 2001
On Sale: January 30, 2001
320 pages
ISBN: 0316767727
EAN: 9780316767729
Paperback
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Fiction
In the J.D. Salinger benchmark "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish," Seymour Glass floats his beach mate Sybil on a
raft and tells her about these creatures' tragic flaw.
Though they seem normal, if one swims into a hole filled
with bananas, it will overeat until it's too fat to escape.
Meanwhile, Seymour's wife, Muriel, is back at their Florida
hotel, assuring her mother not to worry--Seymour hasn't lost
control. Mention of a book he sent her from Germany and
several references to his psychiatrist lead the reader to
believe that World War II has undone him.The war hangs over
these wry stories of loss and occasionally unsuppressed
rage. Salinger's children are fragile, odd, hypersmart,
whereas his grownups (even the materially content) seem
beaten down by circumstances--some neurasthenic, others
(often female) deeply unsympathetic. The greatest piece in
this disturbing book may be "The Laughing Man," which starts
out as a man's recollection of the pleasures of storytelling
and ends with the intersection between adult need and
childish innocence. The narrator remembers how, at nine, he
and his fellow Comanches would be picked up each afternoon
by the Chief--a Staten Island law student paid to keep them
busy. At the end of each day, the Chief winds them down with
the saga of a hideously deformed, gentle, world-class
criminal. With his stalwart companions, which include "a
glib timber wolf" and "a lovable dwarf," the Laughing Man
regularly crosses the Paris-China border in order to avoid
capture by "the internationally famous detective" Marcel
Dufarge and his daughter, "an exquisite girl, though
something of a transvestite." The masked hero's luck comes
to an end on the same day that things go awry between the
Chief and his girlfriend, hardly a coincidence. "A few
minutes later, when I stepped out of the Chief's bus, the
first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper
flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It
looked like someone's poppy-petal mask. I arrived home with
my teeth chattering uncontrollably and was told to go
straight to bed."
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