Have you read J D Salinger? Very likely you have. Amazed at the precision, the million tiny strokes, the sparseness of the early stories, all of them hilarious and heartbreaking, rife with glowing, pulsing symbolism.
Before she went to work for the literary agency that represented Salinger, Joanna Rakoff had not read the canon of the celebrated recluse. This gap in her otherwise erudite education was resoundingly rectified in the latter part of her marvelous memoir, MY SALINGER YEAR (Bloomsbury Circus).
An English major and budding poet, Rakoff was instantly disavowed any of the romanticism that working in the literary world may have naively anticipated.
“So”, says her potential employer at the job interview, lighting a long brown cigarette that somehow reminds her simultaneously of Don Corleone and Lauren Bacall, “you can type?!”
It’s 1996 and the office of The Agency is a snug, smug in its Luddite lack of world wide web, a digital age dinosaur with Rolodex, Dictaphone, and Selectric typewriters.
Rakoff’s job is to transcribe contracts and correspondence for the array of the Agency’s clients, a catalogue that cradles from the grave authors as diverse as Dylan Thomas and Agatha Christie, and the living just as varied, with the likes of Judy Blume, whose new manuscript she is given to read.
Among the most copious of the correspondence are form letters to Salinger fans, and it is through processing these posts that she begins to truly understand the magnitude of the writer’s effect on his reader’s, old and young, male and female.
Salinger, or Jerry as he is known at The Agency, is a prevailing presence throughout this compulsively readable recollection, with Rakoff taking numerous phone calls from the deaf as a post author before they finally meet. (The only other author sighted by Rakoff is Judy Blume, also at that time represented by The Agency).
Rakoff is living with Don, an aspiring writer and boxer, but it’s not the great romance she hankers for “He surrounded himself with fools – the broken, the failed or failing, the sad and confused- so that he might be their king. But what did that make me?!”.
It’s a ghastly relationship, made all the more heartbreaking as Rakoff pines for the college boyfriend she jettisoned.
Salinger’s stories are anatomies of loss, a portrait of grief. That’s not Rakoff’s brief. Hers is a mostly positive story, a sunny reminisce of a time and place that was almost bygone before she arrived. Pure reading pleasure and a prompt to revisit Jerry Salinger.