“J.D. Salinger died today,” I said to Cheryl as we pulled dinner from the refrigerator. “Guess how old he was.”
She gave it some thought, some process using a date she knew, when she first read the book, or something, and then tried, “Ninety-two?”
“Wow, that was good. Yeah, he was 91.”
Later, after I’d let Rico out on the porch for his nightly commune with nature from the safety of our bedroom deck, I shared, “You know, he was one of my five or six favorite authors, or at least favorite writers – people whose style really influenced me, who I tried to write like. Know who the others were?”
I started to give the list, but she blurted out, “No, I know this – wait, give me a minute. Um, T, Ta, who’s that guy, Thomas …”
“Yeah, that’s one, Thomas Pynchon.”
“And the guy from Aspen, Hunter Thompson, him for sure. Mark Twain, I know. And, Garrison?”
“Yeah for sure, that’s five, you’re good, you really know me.” I felt very loved and intimate right then – my wife knows my inner thoughts about writers who touched my deepest core. “What about the sixth?”
“Hmm, I don’t know.”
“No, I don’t think you‘d know that, Herman Melville.” Well, maybe on reflection not him, but never mind now.
And specifically, one book for each: Catcher in the Rye, Gravity’s Rainbow, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Huckleberry Finn, Lake Wobegon Days, and Moby Dick. That’s what I had in mind with that list. But on reflection, the whale story doesn’t fit as well with that group as Catch-22 and Joseph Heller. Maybe not Heller either, because while he wrote a funny funny story like the others, he wasn’t really the writer the others are.
Anyway, those five or six guys to me are the Great American Novelists. They each had such a distinct voice, each wrote as if speaking their tale.
Keillor has the least vernacular, but is the most obviously true to his actual conversation. We’re privileged to hear that weekly on A Prairie Home Companion, so we know exactly how he sounds when he talks, and his novels are a true transcription of his monologues. His humor is also the most subtle, grounded in the very ordinariness of his people and their concerns. The burghers of Lake Wobegon are so true to themselves and their isolation that we find ourselves rooting for them, no matter how embarrassing the holes they dig.
Thomas Pynchon has a reputation for being a Serious Novelist, Difficult and Erudite. But at heart, he’s just having fun. One look at his characters’ names, and a quick perusal of the plot-lines he creates, and it’s quite clear the man is a clown at heart, and takes nothing seriously. Even his erudition, which he can’t escape. I think he’s only satisfied when he’s writing complicated sentences about esoteric episodes in history, because he’s trying to remain engaged in his project, and is mainly trying to entertain himself. We’re just along for the ride.
With Hunter Thompson, the ride is everything. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” In 1971, in Los Angeles, when I read that opening line in Rolling Stone, I was mesmerized. True, at 22, one is quite impressionable, but I had already devoured Catch-22 when I was 13, with Holden Caulfield coming along a year later. Ever since, I’ve had Hunter in the back of my mind whenever I write anything. Make it real, make it spontaneous, make it incongruously funny.
All these men had their roots in Salinger’s spoken prose. Wandering sentences, full of concise asides, festooned with italics and separate clauses set aside with dashes. “I mean”, “maybe”, “anyway” all act to evince a too-smart, too-rich urban teenager, a weary cynical innocent trapped between a child enmeshed in the world and a man separated from it. And, he works so hard to make light of everything, so hard we have to laugh, too.
And, of course, the original oral novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain can’t help creating laughter, but he also can’t help being serious and preachy and silly smart. Just like all these other guys I like.
So tonight, I raise a glass to Mr. Salinger. I hope they find you up there, Messrs. Clemens and Thompson, and that you make room for Pynchon and Keillor, and then you all can share stories and jokes and anger and smokes and joy, and look down on those of us still here, who remember you and smile.