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 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. ( )

i was sick in bed with my first autumn cold of eighth grade (not that i am anything as glamorous as "sickly" just vaguely weak in constitution), and my brother Owen brought me _Nine Stories_ to read. i was pretty sure i should pretend i'd already read it because there was something like a secret Salinger cult operating in my house, and frankly, i felt (more than) a little left-out. so i humbled myself, accepted the invitation/offering (even better than a cool lima bean!), and eventually distinguished myself as the most zealous and irrational member of said cult. yay! ( )

This year I think I discovered that I really like short stories. This book was no exception. Compared to my favorite collection so far, [b:Tenth of December|13641208|Tenth of December|George Saunders|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1349967540s/13641208.jpg|19256026], I felt a little less satisfied with these . . .some of endings really left my imagination to fill in the blanks, but I also find that process enjoyable. Short story authors leave some work up to the reader (as do the best novelists), and to me, that's thought provoking.

My favorite of the stories was "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" about a husband and wife with terrible trust issues. The husband calls his good friend when his wife doesn't come home one night and the conversation doesn't go as one might expect.

"For Esme - With Love and Squalor" also really captured my imagination when a military man meets a precocious and perceptive young girl in a cafe, and she promises to keep in touch. Very moving. "The Laughing Man" is also terrific as a young man and coach relates a story to his team as he falls in love himself.

Salinger has an amazing way with dialogue and always assumes his reader is intelligent. I was definitely sorry this book wasn't Seventeen Stories . . .

( )

1.1

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 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. ( )