2014

Post-Reading: My Salinger Year


 

My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff truly reads like a memoir, most strikingly because the people in her story feel far too real to be of pure fiction. They don’t even seem fictionalized for the purposes of creating a smooth narrative. Even the minor characters – Olivia, Jenny, the college boyfriend – leave an impression, as if you had briefly met them in person.
 
When Rakoff begins working at the Agency, the real-life Harold Ober Associates, she enters a small world casually populated with massive literary icons. Just like Rakoff, I feel nervous and unabashedly curious in the presence of Judy Blume, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and of course, Salinger. The peeks into even the most basic interactions between Rakoff and Salinger are somehow revealing. Here, Salinger calls the Agency and references an earlier phone conversation with Rakoff, in which she tells him that she writes poetry:
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Currently Reading: My Salinger Year

I am memoir-bound with three planned stops, beginning with My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff. Rakoff writes of her year working at Harold Ober Associates, New York’s historic literary agency, which she refers to simply as “the Agency.” Rakoff explains, “I had dropped out of graduate school — or finished my master’s, depending on how you looked at it,” a self-depreciating distinction that I love. She is the Assistant to Phyllis Westberg, the President of the Agency and literary agent to the one and only Jerry Salinger.
 
It is 1996 and the age is pre-digital, at least in the literary world, or at least in the Agency. Rakoff uses a Selectric typewriter and a Dictaphone, the copy machine is the office’s newest technology, and there are no computers. There are whispers of other offices doing away with interoffice memos in favor of e-mail. Rakoff hears from a friend whose own office has decided to go paperless and Rakoff responds, “How is that possible?”
 
From Rakoff’s intelligent take on life, to the drama and inner workings of a literary agency, to the candid appearances by Salinger himself, I am thoroughly enjoying it all. It is a quick read if you want it to be, though I am taking my time with it. I am at the part where Salinger gives word to Phyllis Westberg that he wants to go forward with the publication of Hapworth 16, 1924. Based on how those events unraveled in real life, I am excited to maybe learn what went on inside Harold Ober Associates during that time, courtesy of Rakoff and her Salinger year.

The Young Folks

Salinger was just 21 years old when he published his very first story, The Young Folks, a critical portrayal of a shallow college party. It was published in 1940 in Story, a small but reputable literary magazine that new authors turned to after being rejected by the likes of The New Yorker or Collier’s.
 
Salinger opens the story throwing poetic jabs at his characters, who are mingling with highballs and cigarettes in hand. Salinger describes Edna Phillips sitting in a big red chair, “wearing a very bright eye which young men were not bothering to catch.” Lucille Henderson “sighed as heavily as her dress would allow, and then, knitting what there was of her eyebrows, gazed about the room…” Salinger clearly does not think highly of this crowd, which he repeatedly points out includes a “small blonde” and “three young men from Rutgers.”
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