Review: Nine Stories

Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty straightforward to read, but NOT straightforward to understand, which I guess is how these kinds of short stories ought to be written to begin with. It felt more jarring here considering how often I would find myself puzzling over what just happened after finishing each story.

A lot of the stories aren’t very… happy when you think about them, which kind of draws on Salinger’s preoccupation with the experiences of soldiers post-war and the shallowness of traditional American values and society in the 40’s and 50’s. Incidentally, I couldn't help notice how children played a role in almost all of the stories. The first one, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", encapsulates all of this pretty well, and especially after considering it within the context of the later works about Seymour Glass, or should I say "see more glass"… I just wanted to crawl into a bed somewhere and lie down for a while. Sigh.

Three of the stories here are actually Glass family stories, but you wouldn’t really know it unless you’d read Zooey or Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters first, because these stories function well independently already, and actually came out before those two, which were written at a point when Salinger was starting to consolidate the world of the Glasses (pun intended). The stories here are also very different in character than his later works, although you can start to see signs of his interest in spiritual topics like Zen philosophy by the time of the last story in this collection, “Teddy."

A worthwhile read overall, but expect to have to think a lot more than usual to really appreciate, because it’s really easy for these to go over your head and they go by fast.