I Am Re-reading Franny and Zooey For The Second Time This Month

On January 27, JD Salinger's corpse will turn two years old. Franny and Zooey--though nitpicked by Updike, who is a cad, and by Joan Didion, who is the greatest nonfiction writer of the past fifty years--is Salinger’s finest moment. If you haven’t read Salinger since high school, start with either that or Nine Stories. Don’t start with Catcher in the Rye unless you are a sexually frustrated teenage boy.

Because I was a sexually frustrated teenage boy, I started with Catcher in the Rye. For a book report, I had to pick one novel from a pre-approved list of fifty. I picked Catcher not because I was a twelve-year-old version of Holden Caulfied, but because my older brother already owned it, which meant I would not have to borrow a book from the library, which meant I would save the $1.50 of late fees I would have inevitably incurred.

I’ve reproduced the tale here not just because I invariably go out of my way to recommend a good prose pacifier to divorced parents of petulant twelve-year-olds, but for quite another reason. What directly follows is a question about quality versus quantity, a question that is only fair when it pertains to artists who are already deceased.

If you’re a Salinger junkie, you have little choice but to read and re-read his slender oeuvre to get your fix. This is not healthy or admirable or even advisable. Since he published a mere four books, roughly eight-hundred pages in all, whenever I get that Salinger itch, there’s no place to scratch but the slim spine of one of my pocket-sized paperbacks. And I hate that. Like a more traditional junkie, I find myself lying to my mom instead of telling her the truth, instead of telling her that I am re-reading Franny and Zooey for the second time this month. It’d be a boon, not a bane, to his fans if Salinger had been more like Bob Dylan or Woody Allen or Philip Roth. Every year it seems there’s a new Roth novel in my stocking or a Woody Allen movie in my NetFlix queue or a Dylan album in my iTunes -- some superlative, some in that middle ground between mediocre and good, and some which are embarrassing, but totally have the right to exist. Regardless of their merit, however, I taste and decide for myself if I should return for seconds. Who knows? In a decade or so I might actually enjoy Bob Dylan’s Christmas album.

So which do you prefer: Artists who produce prodigiously, even if their production might occasionally be embarrassing? Or artists who are pickier with their output, producing less, but producing consistently superb art?

Elliott Krause is a Defunct staff reader and contributor to Ye Olde Blogge.