Nine Stories (For Esme With Love and Splendour and Other Stories - J.D. Salinger)

Member Name: Jake Speed

Product:	For Esme With Love and Splendour and Other Stories - J.D. Salinger
Date:	12/09/08 (213 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny, moving, dark, surreal

Disadvantages: Nothing really

'For Esmé with Love and Squalor' is a classic collection of short stories by JD Salinger and was first published in 1953. The book runs to 148 pages and features nine different stories. Anyone who has read Catcher In The Rye but no other Salinger works should definitely get around to reading 'For Esmé with Love and Squalor'. It's the most readable and accessible of his other books and quite brilliant at times. The stories are sometimes dark, sometimes surreal, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, but all crackle with Salinger's invention, wonderful dialogue and sarcastic humour.

'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' begins 'For Esmé with Love and Squalor'. It's a very unique and very dark story set in a swanky beach resort. Seymour Glass, a man obviously suffering from some sort of breakdown, is on holiday with his shallow wife. He ends up chatting to a young girl on the beach who he entertains by spinning out a yarn about the 'bananafish', a strange undersea fish which swims into 'banana holes' to feed. This story is a very impressive start to the collection and played a major role in establishing Salinger's reputation when it was originally unveiled as an independent piece of work. It's very sleek and spare with a playful sense of humour and very dark undertones.

'Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut' is about Mary Jane and Eloise, two suburban women who get drunk one afternoon. A tragic event clouds one of the characters. Salinger served in World War 2 and many of his stories have a real sense of what it was like to live in the aftermath of that incredible event in history and the still fresh memories and losses and mental scars. 'Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut' is another story that has these powerful undertones. It's an interesting story that unravels nicely to reveal more to the reader and includes some typically sassy Salinger dialogue:

Eloise, with a fresh drink in each hand, stopped short. She extended both fingers, gun-muzzle style, and said "Don't nobody move. I got the whole damn place surrounded."

'Just Before the War with the Eskimos' introduces us to Selena and Ginnie, two girls who play tennis together and share a cab home quite often. Ginnie always seems to pay though and she's fed up with it. When the cynical Ginnie decides to complain about this the girls come to the brink of falling out and Ginnie is left waiting in Selena's flat. She then meets Selena's brother Franklin, an encounter that makes up the bulk of this short story. Franklin (who is very Holden Caulfield) makes a big impression on Ginnie and she rethinks some of her attitudes. Some sparky Salinger style dialogue throughout;

Ginnie briefly held her fire. Very briefly. "What were you doing in Ohio?" she asked.
"Me? Working in a god-damn airplane factory."
"You were?" said Ginnie. "Did you like it?"
"Did you like it?" he mimicked. "I loved it. I just adore airplanes. They're so cute." He looked down at the street, scratching his spine with his thumb. "Look at 'em," he said. "God-damn fools."

It's the sort of story you feel like reading again to pick out little bits you didn't notice before. It's a charming story with a nice arc for Ginnie and Salinger includes plenty of humour, Catcher In The Rye style dialogue and criticisms of war and an alienated society.

'The Laughing Man' is another charming story. A first person narrator remembers his childhood days in the "Comanches", a sort of cub scout group in New York in 1928. The Comanches are supervised by the 'Chief', a young Law student. The Chief organises their baseball matches and keeps them entertained with his tales of 'The Laughing Man', a strange comic book style character who has incredible adventures:

Soon the Laughing Man was reguarly crossing the Chinese border into Paris, France, where he enjoyed flaunting his high but modest genius in the face of Marcel Dufarge, the internationally famous detective and witty consumptive...what was left of his fortune the Laughing man converted into diamonds, which he lowered casually in emerald vaults into the Black Sea. He subsisted exclusively on rice and eagles' blood, in a tiny cottage with an underground gymnasium and shooting range on the stormy coast of Tibet.

The ever more ludicrous tales of The Laughing Man are very inventive and funny and they match the mood of the broader story where the introduction of the Chief's girlfriend provides its own subtle drama. The Laughing Man is a very clever, touching story about the end of childhood and looking back on summers that seemed to last forever.

'Down at the Dinghy' is a very short but haunting story. Boo Boo Tannenbaum's son Lionel has taken to hiding in his father's boat. Boo Boo tries to find out why he wants to run away sometimes and must coax him out of the hold of the craft. This is a very pleasant and brief story and Salinger gives Boo Boo some very charming and amusing banter with her son. The story has some symblic undertones and also touches on casual racism and innocence.

'For Esmé - with Love and Squalor' is the most famous and probably most touching of the stories collected in this book. The story is set in Devon in 1944. Sergeant X, a US soldier stationed in the West Country for 'pre-invasion' exercises, meets young Esmé and her brother in a cafe on a rainy day. This chance encounter with childhood innocence and silliness later becomes an unexpected source of strength to the soldier just when the war seems to have become too much for him. This story has all the elements you'd expect from Salinger and fuses them together into a perfect short story. It's funny, very evocative of the era and its sense of location, and has vivid and memorable characters like the precoious Esmé. It also has a very moving ending.

'Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes' is about a late night telephone conversation between friends who are also lawyers. It's not my favourite story in the book but it's clever story with a nice ending and good use of Salinger's sarcastic humour as the two characters discuss marriage and their suspicions:

I pratically have to keep myself from opening every god-damn closet door in the apartment - I swear to God. Every night I come home, I half expect to find a bunch of bastards hiding all over the place. Elevator boys. Delivery boys. Cops-

'De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period' is one of my favourite stories in the book, this one is written in a comic style and tells the tale of a pretentious young man who goes to work at a strange 'correspondence' Art Academy run by an eccentric old Japanese couple. "It took me almost as long to select a pseudonym as it had taken me to write the whole letter," says our hero. It's very funny and always interesting as he struggles to cope with his new position where all is not quite as it seems. The young man tells a lot of whoppers to pretend he is connected and knowledgable in the art world but the joke is he's a bit clueless. Why was he hired? All will be revealed. There is a lot of funny stuff in this story especially when Salinger writes about the comically hopeless and weird paintings sent in by the correspondence students. It moves to a profound ending and is great fun:

Late that night I lay awake in bed, with Mme Yoshoto's Japanese-Malayan dinner still en mass and riding my sternum like an elevator.

'Teddy' is a very strange and quite complex story to end the collection. Teddy is a ten year-old boy on a cruise with his family. We quickly learn that he is no ordinary boy but some sort of strange child genius. Much of this story consists of a conversation between Teddy and a man on the ship which Salinger uses to discuss Buddhism, religion and Far East philosophy. It's pretty interesting and Salinger is excellent as usual setting up the family and sense of location with realistic natural dialogue, but I do struggle a little whenever a character in a book starts talking about the 'Vedantic theory of reincarnation' or 'finite dimensions'!

Overall, 'For Esmé - with Love and Squalor' is a wonderful collection of stories and highly recommended.

Summary: Must read book