J. D. Salinger Writing Style

A young man on a Florida beach tells a little girl about bananafish. They swim into a hole, eat so many bananas they swell up, and then the hole is too small to get back out of. Sybil takes this in. He kisses the arch of her foot, walks back across the sand, rides the elevator up while accusing a stranger of staring at his feet, lets himself into the room where his wife lies asleep on one of the twin beds, and shoots himself. A Perfect Day for Bananafish explains none of it. What the story knows about Seymour Glass is spread through the small talk on either side of that gun, a long-distance call about nail polish and a sunburn, and the reader has to assemble the man out of the leftovers.

His voice was built in public, over years. The New Yorker printed a Holden Caulfield story called Slight Rebellion off Madison well before the novel existed, and the ice-skating date with Sally Hayes is already sitting inside it. Collier's ran another one. Salinger rebuilt both inside The Catcher in the Rye, then spent the rest of his life blocking anyone who wanted to collect the early magazine work. The talk sounds unplanned. It was the last thing he got right.

Holden opens the novel by declining to tell you about his childhood, and he names David Copperfield as the thing he is refusing to do. He keeps that promise all the way through. His judgments run in one direction, adults are frauds and children are exempt, and they keep turning back on him, because the boy who cannot stand the movies goes to the movies, and the boy who cannot stand liars is the most accomplished liar in the book. You read the report and keep your own ledger of the verdicts. That gap does the work a weaker novel would spend a scene on.

Nine Stories is the better laboratory for a writer, because the machinery runs there without a teenager attached to it. Sergeant X in For Esmé with Love and Squalor is an adult with a war behind him. Eloise in Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut is a suburban wife three drinks into an afternoon. Same engine. Report accurately, judge wrongly, and keep the one load-bearing fact off the page. Start there rather than at the slang.

Evidence smuggled into an errand

Stradlater asks Holden to knock out a descriptive composition for him while he is on a date, something easy, a room or a house. Holden writes about his dead brother's baseball mitt, which had poems copied onto it in green ink so Allie would have something to read out in the field. Stradlater comes back annoyed that it is not a room. On the surface the scene is a chore and a quarrel between roommates, and the load-bearing fact of the novel goes past inside it. Put your worst fact in the middle of somebody's admin. A reader watching a small argument takes delivery of a large one without bracing.

Judgment stored in an object

Jane Gallagher kept all her kings in the back row when she played checkers. Holden mentions it more than once and explains it not at all, because what matters is that he noticed and has held onto it. One habit carries what a paragraph about her would have flattened, that she liked the look of them lined up, that winning could wait, and that he has been carrying this around while telling you about other things. Choose the detail only one person would have kept. Then decline to interpret it, since an interpreted detail becomes a symbol, and a symbol closes the case you wanted left open.

The scene built around somebody absent

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters puts a wedding party in a stalled car in the heat, and the bridegroom does not turn up. Seymour Glass is the subject of every line spoken in that car and the one person outside it, so a reader learns him entirely through the irritation of strangers. Fitzgerald used the same shape at Gatsby's party, where the host gets discussed by people who could not pick him out of the room. The tool solves a hard problem cheaply. A character described by a friend arrives pre-approved, a character assembled from hostile witnesses has to be worked out, and worked-out characters are the ones readers defend.

A second story running beside the real one

In The Laughing Man a young law student drives a busload of boys to the ball field and tells them an adventure serial about a disfigured outlaw, one installment at a time. His own romance with Mary Hudson runs in the background, mostly invisible to the boys. On the afternoon it ends, the serial ends too, and the outlaw dies. The narrator is nine and has no idea why he is shaking on the way home. Two stories, then, and the narrating character can read only one of them. The invented story takes the damage the real one declines to report.

The payoff delivered as a household object

Franny has a religious crisis and her brother answers it with soup. Zooey tells her their mother carried chicken soup down the hall to her and that she would not drink it, and that anyone who cannot recognize consecrated chicken soup when it arrives on a tray is going to have trouble locating God anywhere else. The argument had been running for pages in abstractions. It lands on a bowl. Keep your largest claim tied to something a character can pick up, because an abstraction in dialogue makes readers evaluate your position, and an object makes them watch the scene.

One word misheard

Down at the Dinghy sits a small boy in a boat at the end of a dock, refusing to come in, while his mother works out what happened. The maid in the kitchen had called his father a name. Lionel heard the wrong word, something about a kite, and ran. Boo Boo catches the mistake and understands the whole afternoon at once, and Salinger spends a line on it. A mishearing is the cheapest engine in the kit. It gives a child a reason to act, hands an adult a reason to flinch, and keeps the ugly word out of the child's mouth while putting it in the reader's ear.

Skaz (the voice that sounds spoken)

Lodge lists the machinery that makes Holden sound like a teenager talking. Slang repeated because finding a second word would take thought. Hyperbole for everything. Short broken syntax, down to sentences with no verb in them. The effect is that we seem to be listening instead of reading. Twain built this instrument for American prose in Huckleberry Finn, and Holden is the recognizable descendant, moved to a Manhattan prep school and given money. What the device buys is trust, since a reader who believes they are being spoken to will accept judgments they would argue with in an essay, and that is why the argument in these books arrives inside chatter.

The hidden fact (an omission with consequences)

Sergeant X sits in a room in Bavaria after the fighting stops, and the story shows his gums bleeding, his hands failing at a simple job, a propaganda book he opens and writes a line of Dostoevsky into. What happened to him goes unstated. Then a parcel arrives from a girl he met once in an English tearoom, her dead father's wristwatch inside it with the crystal broken, and he falls asleep for the first time in the story. Vargas Llosa's rule is that the silence must have a definite influence on the explicit part, or the writer has cut something merely superfluous. Here the absence is the reason every visible detail counts.

Inconscience (the narrator who deceives himself)

Booth's stipulation is that unreliable narration has little to do with lying. The narrator is mistaken, or credits himself with qualities the author quietly withholds. Holden hides nothing on purpose, and the unusable parts of his account are the parts about himself. Nabokov built Humbert Humbert at the loud end of the same principle, a narrator whose eloquence is the evidence against him, while Salinger works the quiet end, where the tell is a boy calling half the world phony inside a book that keeps showing him performing. Wood's addition matters for anyone copying this. The author has to flag the gap, or the reader has nowhere to stand outside the voice.

Aposiopesis (the sentence that breaks off)

Salinger stops thoughts before they finish, and the cut works as a hinge rather than an ornament. The last sentence of For Esmé with Love and Squalor has an exhausted soldier reaching for the word faculties, breaking it in half, and then spelling it out letter by letter, so the story closes on a man audibly failing to say a simple thing. Holden runs the smaller version constantly, announcing a subject and then finding something else to be annoyed about. The device proves a statement exists while refusing to deliver it. Readers supply the rest, and what a reader supplies is believed harder than what a writer hands over.

Taking the contempt and leaving out the cost

Snark is the cheapest part of the voice and it holds nothing up. Writers hand a narrator a wide sneer, point it at whatever is in reach, and then wonder why the pages have gone slack. Holden's contempt costs him constantly. He despises the movies and keeps going to them, despises phonies and performs for a stranger on a train, and describes himself as an outstanding liar while asking you to trust his account of the week. Each judgment leaves a mark on the person making it. Strip that out and you have a narrator with opinions and no exposure, which reads as a columnist rather than a character.

Writing the bare sentence without the thing it hides

The short flat line is the most copied surface in American prose and the least portable. Suzanne del Gizzo's diagnosis of Hemingway's parodists applies here with no adjustment at all, since they fail because they are working with the sentence and not with the omitted thing behind it. Salinger's plain lines are load-bearing because the pages around them stand thick with specified surface, the number on a hotel room, the size of a tip, the order in which a table gets served, the weather on the day, all of it delivered without comment so the flat line has a crowded room to be flat inside. Take the furniture away and the bare sentence has nothing left to be bare against. Restraint then reads as thinness, which at that point is what it is.

Treating unreliability as a licence to be random

Wood's phrase for most unreliable narrators is reliably unreliable, and the weight belongs on the first word. A reader can see past a narrator only where the author has quietly made the truth available, so the book teaches you how to read its own voice. Distortion that swings in a fresh direction every chapter teaches nothing. Salinger's distortions stay put, which is how the same reader believes Holden's description of a hotel room and throws out his verdict on the person standing in it. Write the pattern down before you write the character. Then break it once, late, and let the break be the event.

Letting the digressions drift because drifting sounds honest

Detours are the most visible feature of the style and the easiest to get wrong. Every long swerve in The Catcher in the Rye circles one of two things, a dead brother and a girl Holden cannot bring himself to phone, so the talk that looks aimless is a narrowing spiral. Saunders is the one to hold onto here, because his claim is that voice belongs to what a story knows rather than sitting on top of it as decoration. A digression that knows nothing is filler with a personality. Mark each tangent in your draft with the one thing it circles. Cut the ones that circle nothing, and move the rest closer to where they pay off.