Nine Stories

In J.D. Salinger's world, you don't want to be more gifted than everyone else. It only leads to trouble. And that's if you're lucky.

This theme in Salinger's work was evident even in his “Nine Stories,” published in 1954. The first and last stories in this classic collection, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "Teddy," are most striking, even shocking, in this regard. In the first, Salinger introduces Seymour Glass, a brainy character found or at least mentioned in much of Salinger's later work, who engages in an imaginative conversation with a little girl at the beach, then returns to his hotel room and calmly shoots himself in the head while his wife sleeps in the bed next to his.

Teddy is a precocious 10-year-old on an ocean voyage show more with his parents and little sister. In a deck-chair conversation he tells a man about how his belief in reincarnation makes him unafraid of death. Readers may get a premonition about what happens next.

"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" tells of a young man with phony credentials who works for a shady company that, for a fee, gives advice by mail to aspiring artists with very little talent. Then he discovers that one of his students has extraordinary talent, but she is a nun whose priest and mother superior frown on her worldly pursuit of art.

Other stories in this priceless collection are almost as notable for their titles as for their subtle and masterful content — "Down at the Dinghy," "Just Before the War with the Eskimos," "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut" and "For Esme — with Love and Squalor" among them.

I first read this book back in the 1960s. My paperback, purchased in a college bookstore, cost 50 cents. It was a pleasure returning to it all these years later. show less

Some of these stories are much much better than others, but as I am now rereading these at an older age, it’s clear Salinger was a total master of story writing. Some of these stories reveal a great, preternatural understanding of childhood, truly like an emotionally savantish 8 year old had transmitted her understandings into Salinger’s brain. Others reveal a great awareness of our world’s many infinite one-way boulevards. (And the less effective stories try and basically fail to cope with this.)

To me the strongest stories are “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esmé - with Love and Squalor,” both of which are basically perfect stories. They are in my all-time great class alongside a couple James Joyce stories, a show more couple by Alice Munro, and maybe one or two of Kafka’s pieces. Maybe a couple others but that’s what’s coming to mind right now. (Edit: forgot Borges)

Also very strong are “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” “The Laughing Man,” “Down at the Dinghy,” and “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.” The closing line of the first story is a classic, and who can forget that “tout le monde est une nonne”? “The Laughing Man” is impressively grotesque and is maybe the clearest bridging point between Salinger’s earlier stories that are more childlike and pained and his later stories that are more desperate and seeking.

But I don’t mean to say that the remaining three (“Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” and “Teddy”) are weak, because I did think they were all pretty good stories, although each for different reasons. The first story was kind of closer to a Catcher in the Rye-ish sort of realism: a brief injection into the lifestreams of some (wealthy) 1940s New Yorkers tinged with strange subterranean hopefulness. The latter two seemed rather more cynical and exasperated, even if “Teddy” tried to deny it / work around it. Teddy was himself an interesting character, if maybe a little goofy.

Love it, wish there was more, hope someday more get published. I am glad to have found later on that my younger self was able to spot such great writing, just because it’s always such a shame when you revisit old stuff you liked and find it totally over sentimental or boring or just plain shite for some reason or another. Salinger is great. show less

I hadn't read these stories in many, many years, and I was curious as to how this collection, published almost 60 years ago, would hold up for me. Re-reading Salinger is also always somewhat an exercise in nostalgia for me, as his style, so singular, puts me in mind of the time in my life when I first read him, and of the wonderful 11th grade literature teacher who introduced me to Catcher in the Rye and at least some of the stories in this collection.

Anyway, one or two of the stories, most especially "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut," I found over-wrought and not especially effective. One or two were good but went on too long, I thought. But there are several that are still and will always be, for me at least, examples of short story show more genius. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," perhaps the Salinger short story most often anthologized, "The Laughing Man," "Down in the Dinghy," and, most especially, "For Esme--With Love and Squalor" are terrific and timeless. In these, Salinger best gets at the American human condition post-World War Two, as American's took stock, counted their losses, and tried to wade through the hollow, enforced "normality" of the materialistic world that was cropping up around them. As a teenager, it didn't occur to me as it did in this latest reading the extent to which almost all of these stories revolve around the damage done to families, psyches and dreams by the experience and/or consequences of the war. show less

Reading this short story collection helps me to understand why Salinger was hounded to the ends of the earth in an effort to make him write again. His characters are so poignant and so real; his children so precocious and on the brink of something wholly indefinable.

I bought the book with a desire to revisit [b:For Esme - With Love And Squalor|22836075|For Esme - With Love And Squalor|J.D. Salinger|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1406572749s/22836075.jpg|42390419] and found it as captivating and moving as I had remembered, but the unexpected treasures of [b:The Laughing Man|15986803|The Laughing Man|J.D. Salinger|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1372036124s/15986803.jpg|21741855] and Teddy left me breathless. Salinger knows complete sorry, show more desperation and irony when he finds it. As we peep into the world of his characters, who smoke their endless cigarettes, carry on their conversations of double meaning, and attempt to connect with others, we cannot help nodding in recognition of the knowledge that this is a microcosm of the human condition. show less

A young woman discusses her husband’s strange behavior on the phone with her mother while the husband is out exhibiting, well, strange behavior. Two college roommates get together in an affluent Connecticut suburb to drink and compare disillusionments in their lives. A teenage girl visits the home of a schoolmate to collect on a debt and winds up having an awkward conversation with her friend’s brother. A man reminisces about a time in his youth when he was part of organized activity group led by a memorable storyteller. A young mother seems in over her head dealing with her precocious, but disturbed, son. A man recalls an impactful encounter with a young girl he met years before while waiting to be deployed in the war. A man calls show more his business partner worrying about his missing wife not realizing the partner knows exactly where she is. A man remembers a time in his life when he pretended to be an accomplished artist to get an ill-fated job at a correspondence school. A ten-year old child prodigy has an unsettling conversation on a cruise ship in which he appears to predict his own demise.

Those are very brief summaries of the tales comprising Nine Stories, a short fiction collection by legendary author J. D. Salinger. Published shortly after the Second World War, that cathartic event infuses many of these stories, either directly or indirectly, as many of the characters have been affected by the loss of loved ones or the challenges of returning to civilian life. The collection is also notable for offering glimpses into complex situations where details are often not revealed fully until the end, if at all. Instead, much of the narrative development takes place through dialogue rather than direct action. This stylistic choice gives the reader a sense of eavesdropping on the various scenes, which proves to be a very effective device, mainly because the author is so good at writing conversations that real people might have actually had with one another. While all the selections were good, there were a few that were truly outstanding and elegiac in their own way, including “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, “For Esme-With Love and Squalor”, and “The Laughing Man”. Overall, this is a book that is thoroughly original and one that has clearly stood the test of time. show less

After reading The Catcher in the Rye I realized that angst and frustration were universal feelings. Franny and Zooey made me fall in love with the Glass family and decide to cover my walls with large sheets of handmade paper, covered in quotes. But it was Nine Stories that's always held my favorite bit of Salinger's writing.

Where his other novels are sometimes a bit too dramatic for my taste, Nine Stories offers single servings, just enough that it feels like brilliance as opposed to whining. In these smaller doses Salinger's writing is poignant and powerful. He doesn't give the reader everything, he makes you work for it and I appreciate that.

Many of the stories deal with someone connected to the Glass family in some way. I get show more something different from them each time I read one. My two favorites are "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which broke my heart and "Down at the Dinghy," sweet in its innocence. "Teddy" is also memorable, because it's a bit disturbing.

Nine Stories has always seemed a bit underrated, which probably makes me love it more. It contains some of Salinger's greatest characters, if only a snapshot of them, and helps me get a Salinger fix if I need one. show less

Embarassingly, I had never read these iconic stories before; having been unimpressed by a glancing encounter with The Catcher in the Rye, I thought of them as irrelevant and dated bits of New Yorker-ly ephemera. In the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger (sp?): "WRONG!" I was stunned by how deeply strange and violent these stories are, full of bitter class envy, alcoholism, psychosis, and other vivid depravities. Salinger's style is full of remarkably precise descriptions that are ominous in what they don't say, or what they only imply: unsettling arhythmic prose.