Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Two novellas that expand upon Salinger's popular Glass family. "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" deals with the day of Seymour's wedding, while "Seymour - An Introduction" is Buddy's stream-of-consciousness discussion of his dead brother.

I adore Salinger's writing for many, many reasons, but my love rests most firmly on two basic elements: voice and style. His stories brim with both. They've got this wonderful elegance to them, even as they flirt with colloquial language and common speech patterns. He does some truly beautiful things with dialogue and internal monologue; however, I did find it difficult, on occasion, to really get inside Buddy's head. With another author, I would have found this intensely frustrating, but with show more Salinger it's all part of the game. Those brief, wonderful moments where Buddy's whole character just opens up are more than worth the moments of reticence and stylistic cover up.

Thematically, I find Salinger's work fascinating in that so much of it deals with dead brothers. I have a particular - and, admittedly, strange - fascination with the dead little brother in literature. It's a surprisingly common theme, (don't believe me? Just think about it for a bit), and one that Salinger works with in The Catcher in the Rye. Here, however, he is concerned with something similar but entirely different - namely, the dead older brother.

Though they deal with other things as well, all Salinger's Glass Family stories are influenced by Seymour's suicide. Anyone who's read Nine Stories or Franny and Zooey already knows what's happened and has seen some of the effects on the family. "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" instantly informs the uninitiated that Seymour has killed himself... then changes the game by rewinding and discussing an event in the past, when Seymour was very much alive. Though he himself makes no appearance in the story, we hear a great deal about him and cannot help but consider what we hear in light of his eventual death. The story is funny, emotional, and a true slice of human experience, but it becomes something potentially dark through our knowledge of Seymour's fate.

"Seymour - An Introduction" is much more raw. Salinger has pulled out all the stops this time around. We already know that Seymour has killed himself. Now we are invited to consider the effect his death has had on Buddy in a much more visceral way than was previously possible. Buddy tells us a great deal about Seymour without giving many concrete details. In fact, when he tries to give the reader anything substantial, he finds himself wandering off into tangents that illuminate his own character as much as Seymour's. It's a beautiful, engaging, and often frustrating look at literature, family, brotherhood and the self. There were moments when one of Salinger's images struck me so hard that I burst out laughing. There were moments when I thought I'd start sobbing wretchedly if I read another word. Like a previous reviewer, I feel that it adds a great deal to the wider Glass Family story... but I'm not sure I could return to it any time soon. I found it an emotionally draining read, but I wouldn't take it back for the world.

I highly recommend Salinger, but I'm not sure that these stories are really the best place to start. If you're new to his work, having somehow managed to avoid The Catcher in the Rye in high school and afterwards, I'd say Nine Stories is probably the best place to start. Save this one for last. It's beautiful, but it is probably the least accessible of Salinger's works. show less

Two stories. The first (Roofbeams) struck me as a masterclass in narrative and characterization. An extended interaction between a small set of people, it's almost impossibly vivid; it reminds me of Raymond Carver, without the minimalism. What actually happens is not so important (although a mystery is solved by the end). It's the kind of story I want to read again just to study the technique. Needless to say, I also enjoyed it immensely as a scene.

The second (Seymour), by contrast, seemed pointless and self-indulgent. Nothing important is revealed, and the narrator's (apparently) amphetamine-fueled, self-conscious logorrhea is irritating and then exhausting. It's all too typical for the writer/narrator to interrupt a sentence with an show more extended parenthetical aside about what led him to write the sentence and how he feels about the sentence and why he's going to write the sentence despite his misgivings about how it might be interpreted. This gets old in a hurry. I found it a struggle to get through.

If it weren't too pat an assumption based on too little data, I'd say Salinger had run out of gas ("Seymour" was his last published story before "Hapworth 16, 1924," which by most accounts was even worse). If the Salinger heirs ever get over their own neuroses and publish the last several decades of their father's work, we might get to test that out. But I'm not holding my breath. show less

While "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is a good story, the second novella in this volume, "Seymour- An Introduction" is utterly pedantic, self-indulgent, and unnecessary. It adds very little to the narrative of the Glass family while retconning the final story from "Nine Stories" so that Buddy had written it. Interestingly, it posits a connection between the Glass Family and the Caulfield family (a Curtis Caulfield on pg. 193), but this largely goes nowhere. Overall, the Glass family and its stories reflect Salinger's later issues as described in David Shields and Shane Salerno's biography of the author.

Raise High:
I will readily admit that the reason I waited so long to read this one is because I hated the thought of no longer having a Salinger book to look forward to. I’ve read his other work and while I wasn’t a huge fan of The Catcher in the Rye (no more whining!); I adore his other books, Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey.

I’ve always been fascinated by the fictional Glass family and at least part of the family is featured in both of those books and in Raise High. Salinger has a unique ability to make the mundane interesting. He sucks me in so quickly and the pages fly by. He usually writes about one short period of time, like Holden wandering around New York for a few days in Catcher. Throughout that time we see flashbacks show more and reference to things that have already happened.

Raise High works in the same way. The story is told from Buddy’s point-of-view. He is the second of seven children in the Glass family. The eldest is the poetic but troubled Seymour. Buddy finds out his older brother is about to get married and the rest of his family can’t make it to the last minute wedding. Buddy manages to get leave from his boot camp to head to New York City for the ceremony. Once he arrives he finds out Seymour has stood up his bride-to-be and Buddy ends up in a limo with the furious Matron-of-Honor and a few other guests of the bride. As the heat rises and a parade halts their progress across the city things become tense.

The other Glass siblings from eldest to youngest are, Boo Boo (girl), the twins Walt and Waker, Zooey (boy) and Franny. They are featured in various stories, but Seymour is the most captivating of the lot. His tale reaches its conclusion in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” one of the chapters in Nine Stories. Seymour is brilliant, but at times he becomes trapped inside his own head in a debilitating way.

Salinger adds small touches to his books that never seem to leave me. I remember reading Zooey for the first time and falling in love with the idea of covering your bedroom walls with quotes. In this book there’s a reference to the family’s tradition of leaving messages with soap slivers on the bathroom mirror as they were growing up. The title of the book actually comes from one such message left by Boo Boo for her brother. It’s a poem, “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man.” There’s also a sweet deaf mute man (the bride’s father’s uncle) who felt like he could have been my own family member.

There is something so real about the diary entries Buddy shares from Seymour’s journal. It feels as though we are given a glimpse into the struggle of a person we all might know. His shining optimistic exterior provides a glaze to a tumultuous underbelly of self-doubt and critical thinking which gives him no peace. It’s characters like Seymour, who we never completely know, that make Salinger’s books so captivating.

“God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.”

“He would despise her for her marriage motives as I’ve put them down here. But are they despicable? In a way, they must be, but yet they seem to me so human-size and beautiful that I can’t think of them even now as I write this without feeling deeply, deeply moved.”

“Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly, and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected – never possessed, since he belongs to God.”

Seymour:

These two pieces by Salinger are always published together, but their styles are incredibly different. While Raise High tells us the events of a single day, Seymour is a reflection on one man’s entire life. They pair perfectly, complementing each other and slowly peeling back the layers of both Seymour and Buddy’s lives.

Both pieces are written by Buddy Glass, the second is a reflection of who Seymour was and how his siblings and friends saw him. But because it’s written by Buddy everything is seen through the filter of his eyes and he can’t help but idolize his older brother. Buddy describes every aspect of Seymour, his looks and beliefs and talks about his collected poems, but he can’t separate how he saw his brother and who his brother truly was.

The whole book is just beautiful and it a new favorite. I particularly loved Seymour’s notes and literary criticisms to Buddy. After Buddy would read a new piece he’d written to his brother, Seymour would wait awhile and process what he thought about the work, he would then write him a response. His notes would be both challenging and uplifting. He would encourage Buddy never to settle for being a people-pleasing writer, but instead to write what mattered to him. What wonderful advice for all writers!

“…but the fact that the great Kierkegaard was never a Kierkegaardian, let alone an existentialist, cheers one bush-league intellectual’s heart no end, never fails to reaffirm his faith in a cosmic poetic justice, if not a cosmic Santa Claus.”

BOTTOM LINE: I loved it. Salinger gets inside my head and touches my emotions in a way that few authors can. Don’t judge his work purely by his most famous book. In my opinion his other work far outshines Catcher in the Rye. show less

Crap. Absolute crap. The most insufferable member of the Glass family, Buddy, both narrates and anchors these two stories. His presence is unavoidable and he is absolutely a pretentious ass and a bore. At least in Salinger's last book, Buddy stayed out of the way to talk about the titular characters, Franny and Zooey. Here you have a narrated story of a completely innocuous wedding event and a rambling collection of reminiscences about the most mysterious Glass, Seymour. Unfortunately, Seymour makes a much stronger presence in the masterful short story, "A Perfect Day For Bananafish" (which I'd recommend along with the book Nine Stories, which shows Salinger on the decline but more near the beginning of it so it's not so bad). All in show more all, I cannot recommend this book to anybody but the airiest of blockheads. Nobody would find the supposed geniuses in this book to their liking in any capacity of the word. I give the book an extra half-star because it at least shows a little of Salinger's compositional acumen, but if you want to read Salinger, chuck this book and pick up The Catcher In The Rye for another read. This one's a lemon. show less

A reread after a long time, I found Salinger’s prose so fun and refreshing. The plot of the first story is a marvel to me—I love its absurdity and its humanity. The images of this plot are still so bright in my mind, a testimony to the vitality of the prose.
The second story is so loving. To be loved as Buddy loves Seymour! I admire the holding-together of this underlying depth of love and the dapperness of its expression. That Buddy’s dapperness does indeed convey his love.

Raise High was beautiful, a 4.5. Seymour: An Intro was bumbly in a charming way, still engrossing, but more a dramatic essay than a story (definitely the point). Sid by side they set up an intriguing contrast: one is all sparse narrative, the other a dramatic monologue with only intermittent scenes. Both, however, will linger with me. Seymour was, I think, less good, but it seemed an invaluable record of Salinger's struggles as an artist (a charming, bumbling manifesto).