My Salinger Year

Joanna Rakoff
My Salinger Year

Bloomsbury Circus, 2014

In the mid-90's 23-year-old Rakoff returnes from London, where she graduated from the university, to her native New York. Young graduate, she changes her plans to go to California, remains in New York, where she lives with her Marxist boyfriend Don in an inferior apartment, and gets a job in an old-fashioned literary agency which the book will be referred to simply The Agency.

Joanna was hired after one interview just before Christmas. She expects that her literary agent assistant duties will include reading manuscripts and search for literary talents, but mostly (at least in the early part of the book) she is doing what usually secretary does: return calls, typing documents, making decryption of recordings, answers to readers’ letters. The Agency, where Rakoff works, still does everything the way it was done in the 40s, when The Agency was established. All documentation is printed on a typewriter, a prehistoric dictophone with foot pedals is used, fax and xerox will appear in the office not soon, computer with internet access in the office will be put towards the end of the first year of Joanna’s work.

Rakoff’s boss, whose name we do not know, is an old woman who is antique as everything in the office. Besides Joanna’s boss, The Agency’s stuff includes several such old women, one of them resigns over the book course - lung cancer. The boss has several clients and talks on the phone with the same range of people, including a Jerry and another man, in which Joanna guesses her boss’s lover.
Joanna’s boss gives her some guidelines: not to give the address and phone number of Jerry to anyone, politely say generally everyone who calls about Jerry to stop calling, do not engage in conversation with Jerry, immediately switch him to the boss’ line. Rakoff does not immediately guess who Jerry in question is until she looks closer at the backs of books, standing in the office, and only then she realizes that Jerry is Salinger.

Rakoff’s memories partially can be attributed to the category of what is called "tangential memoirs." Writer of memories considers it his ot her duty to inform the world about his acquaintance, tangentially, pointing to some famous person. Accordingly, it often happens that the story of the memoirist has no value if it were not for this brief moment of crossing paths with the famous.
In this case, it is true, but not quite so. Salinger here really is included to attract attention. Rakoff did not read his books until she meets Salinger alive in The Agency office and essentially she had nothing to say about him as a writer. In the finale, the author begins an attempt to analyze the works Salinger, tells how they grabbed her soul, but it is not quite interesting to read and it gives a sense if not moralizing, the author’s just trying to impose her views.

Yet to dismiss My Salinger Year as a memoir of another writer trying to sunbath in the glory of someone else would be wrong. Because this book has its value and its charm, just from a different perspective. My Salinger Year is great memoires of the life of the literary agency, of bohemian life in New York of mid-90s. Rakoff's voice there has a passion, wisdom and measure. Her memoir is a sad notes with punching satire. If Salinger here had fictitious name, and you’d get a charming novel about a 20-year-olds. Rakoff has all the makings of the novelist. The book doesn’t have a pronounced plot (the intrigue with the publication of the book is not so clingy), but it is not a thriller, just a fragment of life of a young graduate.

Building up the image of Salinger and his readers (whose letters we read in the course of the book), Rakoff writes without snobbery, but with a bit of humor. Part of the humor stems from the fact that Rakoff first enters into adulthood and she doesn’t succeed at everything.

These failures, "moderate unhappiness", are rooted in the life style of the author. Her society is bohemian young people, with dreams of exhibitions and publications. Accordingly, the problems of the Brooklyn youth are quite peculiar. For these young bohemian people the book is designed primarily for, and that does not make it worse.

My Salinger Year is a voracious read, and its reading is accompanied by a healthy laugh.

The Salinger Contract

Adam Langer
The Salinger Contract

Open Road Media, 2013

The Salinger Contract is a novel within the novel, written by Adam Langer the character. Langer the character is the author of a book of memoirs in the form of a novel about the search for his father, whom Adam had never seen. Adam and his wife Sabina lived in New York, where Adam worked in a literary magazine. But with the arrive of hard times for literary magazines, publishing houses and the economy in general, Adam and his wife and their two daughters left New York City and moved to a small town of Bloomington, Indiana, where the wife of Adam gets a teaching position in the University, and Adam is staying home with the kids and thinking on his second book.

While working at the magazine, Adam wrote small essays on writers he met and interviewed. So Adam had once met the author of thrillers Conner Joyce. Joyce then was very popular with his series about a supercop. Joyce said to Langer in an interview that he was always attracted to the writers, hiding themselves from the public - Salinger, Dudek, Pynchon, and others. In his youth, he even wrote letters to all these hermits, but never received a response.

And six years after the interview Adam accidentally stumbles in a bookstore to an invitation to a meeting with the writer Joyce, who has a new book coming out. Adam comes to a meeting, where, in addition to him, only ten people come to see the writer. After reading Adam and Connor go to a bar where they drinks and discuss the old days. Conner complaines that his writing career, apparently, is coming to an end. His novels can no longer find a reader, and he does not know what to do in the future. Adam after meeting with Conner drives to the hotel and thinks that now he will not see Joyce a few more years. But the next evening, Conner calls Adam, which promises to call back, but doesn’t catch Joyce at the hotel. After a while, Conner again calls and asks for a meeting. They meet in a small hotel near Chicago.

Joyce promises Adam to tell every incredible thing that has happened since their last meeting. Joyce convinced that only Adam could believe his story.

If one calls The Salinger Contract a literary mystery, it will reveal the essence of the novel only for 15 percent. Langer’s novel is more complexed and does not fit into the genre framework. It is literaturocentric, yes, but it is a novel about writers, with accessible style, not opressing wih academicism or a meticulous analysis of, for example, a Chinese poem of VII century. It is not necessary to be an expert on Salinger and Mailer or be a collector of first editions to get an indescribable pleasure from reading this book.

About The Salinger Contract would be true to say that this is a novel-fiddle, nimble, equivocate, sham, and a novel-needle, sharp, piercing with its poignant satire on the world of writers, publishers and readers. The real Adam Langer through Adam Langer the narrator tells the amazing story, often giving the word to Conner Joyce. The book turns to the reader that side and this side and presents a fair amount of surprises that you never know what's what. It's no wonder, since the novel is, in fact, about the two liars – and what is a writer, if not a teller of lies? And this is the case when you let to feed yourself a line, because the writer so excitingly tells nonsense, which is incredibly hard to believe.

The book collector Dex says that he likes writers who are attentive to detail, making the book believable. Joyce, in Dex’s opinion, always tried to make his best novels believable. Langer is also from this category of writers. He fascinatingly tells about the publishing kitchen, about the literary life of the city (and small town’s as well), the pain of the writer, and everywhere Langer throws plausible details. The Salinger Contract is also pretty sharp satire on the current state of things in the literary world, so some places may be an exaggeration or distortion, but even in this case you won’t find anywhere fake notes.

The book is generally relevant, however, to a greater extent for the Americans. There is a full-time dad, blogs making fun of professors and HBO pilots, and the popularity of eBook devices, and a university scandal, and all this at the same time is real life and also a parody on a modern American life (largely because of this the book is pretty funny).

Langer in his book laughed at the writer and the reader, but also managed to ask serious questions - about the fate of writers, parental responsibility, the importance of literature.

I will finish this with one word: must-read.