WARNING: CUSSIN' SPOILERS

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a joy to watch because it’s both a Wes Anderson movie and a George Clooney vehicle.

Its Wes Andersonness is obvious. It gives us deadpan humor, father-son conflict, characters associated with one absurd and outdated mode of dress. It tosses up chapter titles (“The Go-For-Broke Mission”) and tosses in a tinkly soundtrack and bouncy-but-obscure, British-invasion-era music (“Let Her Dance” by Bobby Fuller Four). In 2007 I wrote the following about the essential Wes Anderson lesson: Exclusion isn’t necessarily the problem but inclusion is almost always the solution. That’s still true for his films—whether we’re talking Fischers, Tenenbaums and Zissous or foxes, badgers and weasels.

Where “Fox” differs from a typical Wes Anderson movie is in its hero. Anderson’s protagonists generally pretend to be something they’re not: great playwrights, great oceanographers, caring patriarchs. Eventually their true nature is revealed and they’re excluded from where they want to be. Only in returning, chastened and wiser, do they become the very thing they were pretending to be.

The movement for Mr. Fox (George Clooney) is the opposite. His persona is basically the George Clooney persona—the hyper-articulate, know-it-all whose charm resides in not always knowing it all but mustering through with grace and style anyway—and this persona, Mr. Fox’s persona, hardly changes during the course of the movie. For a time he denies his true nature, but he does so for others, not himself, and it’s a mere blip of screentime. It’s not the Anderson cycle of pretense/exclusion/genuineness. It’s the Clooney promise: Get on board, boys, we’re going for a ride!

The reason Mr. Fox is forced to deny his true nature is the reason many of us are forced to deny our true natures: he starts a family. One moment he and his wife are stealing squabs from a nearby farm, the next they’re trapped by a cage. Before they can escape, Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) announces she’s pregnant, and elicits a promise from Mr. Fox that he’ll settle down and never steal squabs and chickens and the like again.

Out of one trap and into another.

For two years (12 fox years, we’re told), Mr. Fox works as a newspaperman and lives with Mrs. Fox and their son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), in a comfortable hole, until one day he says he’s tired of living in their comfortable hole. He’s got his eye on a tree that they can’t afford. Except he really wants the tree because of it overlooks Boggis, Bunce and Bean, three farms producing, in order, chickens, turkey and cider, and run by “three of the meanest, nastiest, ugliest farmers in the valley,” according to Fox’s lawyer, Badger (Bill Murray), who counsels against purchase. Fox ignores him. He tells himself he’s after one last job, by which he means three last jobs, one for each farm. For the first two he drags along Kylie, the passive, not-bright, handyman opossum (Wallace Wolodarsky), who is essentially the Pagoda of this film, and both jobs go off, give or take an electric fence, without a hitch.

For the final job, at Bean’s cider farm, Ash tries to tag along but is sent home; instead Fox relies on Ash’s cousin and rival, Kristofferson Silverfox (Eric Anderson), a meditating, martial-arts-training natural athlete who is staying with the family. Again, give or take a rat guard (Willem Dafoe), and the appearance of the very masculine-looking Mrs. Bean (Helen McCrory), the job goes off without a hitch. The problem: of the three nasty farmers, Bean (Michael Gambon, brilliant here) is the nastiest of the bunch. Also the smartest. And he organizes Boggis and Bunce into bringing the fight to Mr. Fox.

Thus begins a war of escalation. First they attempt to shoot Mr. Fox but succeed only in blowing off his tail (which Bean wears as a tie); then they destroy the Fox’s tree home with bulldozers (shades of “Avatar”!), but discover the Foxes have dug down to safety. When they try to dig them out, the Foxes simply dig deeper, and further, and eventually back into the Boggis, Bunce and Bean farms, from which they steal everything. By this time, other animals have been swept up in the war, and they all gather at a large underground dining table to celebrate. But just as Mr. Fox is delivering his toast of triumph, a rumble is heard. The rumble of cider. They’re being flooded out of their homes and into a sewer, from which there appears no escape.

But there is an escape. Earlier, when Mrs. Fox learned of her husband’s treachery, we got the following dialogue:

Mrs. Fox: Why did you lie to me?
Mr. Fox: Because I’m a wild animal.

Meanwhile, Ash, who likes to wear a cape, and who doesn’t even have a proper bandit mask but uses a reconstituted tube sock, is dealing with others’ perceptions, and his own perception, of his difference.

And that’s their salvation. They’re all wild animals and they’re all different. Mr. Fox, calling everyone by their Latin names (Oryctolagus Cuniculus! Talpa Europea!), uses the talents of each species for their final plan of attack, their final salvation. Exclusion isn’t necessarily the problem but inclusion is almost always the solution.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is delightful on many levels—it’s funny, quirky, tender, adventurous—but it resonates long after you leave the theater for the following reason. The convention of children’s stories is to have wild animals talk, wear clothes, and engage in human professions, and “Mr. Fox” certainly adopts those conventions. Then it upends them by having the wild animals realize the absurdity of not being what they are: wild animals. Wes Anderson, in other words, dresses up his animals as people so the people watching can realize that they, all the lawyers and high school coaches and newspapermen in the audience, are animals. All of us, in small ways, in the clothes we wear or the jobs we have, are denying our true natures. The joy of “Mr. Fox” is that Vulpes Volpes gets to reveal his true nature. The bittersweetness of Homo Sapiens is that, generally, we don’t.

Apparently media outlets are still giving Ishmael Reed, racial curmudgeon, a forum. Last Friday it was The New York Times.

Reed's op-ed is about the film "Precious," and, big surprise, he's not a fan. Neither was I but the two of us are not-fans for diffrent reasons. Actually we may be not-fans for the same reasons but it's hard to tell from Reed's writing. As I mentioned in The Seattle Times in 2003 when I reviewed Reed's book, "Another Day at the Front," if writin' is fightin' (the title of another Reed book) then Reed is one of our great literary flailers. He comes at everyone without landing a solid punch.

He begins with this premise about "Precious": white people love it, black people hate it. Maybe, but his evidence is anecdotal. He also misinterprets the film's director, Lee Daniels, post-Oscar nomination. On Feb. 2, the Times, reported:

Speaking by telephone, Mr. Daniels said he hoped the nomination would bring more viewers to a movie — about the abuse and triumph of an overweight ghetto girl — that has been only a modest draw at the box office. “That’s what these awards do,” he said. “A lot of middle-class white Americans haven’t seen the film yet.”

Reed's take?

In fact, the director, Lee Daniels, said that the honor would bring even more 'middle-class white Americans' to his film."

Reed's biggest problem, as ever, is one of racial assumption. He quotes Barbara Bush: "There are kids like Precious everywhere. Each day we walk by them: young boys and girls whose home lives are dark secrets." He quotes Oprah Winfrey: "None of us who sees the movie can now walk through the world and allow the Preciouses of the world to be invisible." Then Reed asks this question: "Are Mrs. Bush and Ms. Winfrey suggesting, on the basis of a fictional film, that incest is widespread among black families?"

Jesus, I get tired of this. Look, I'm hardly color-blind, but it's seems the group Precious represents for both Mrs. Bush and Ms. Winfrey is: "victims of physical and sexual abuse." To Mr. Reed, it's: "black girls." Who can't see past race here?

Reed adds that shame doesn't fall upon the white community for such films as "Requiem for a Dream," yet "Precious," he writes, casts "collective shame upon an entire community." But that's only true if we see the characters as representatives of the black community. Do we? Does he? Either he can't see past black and assumes no one else can, or he assumes the white community can't see past black so he can't, either.

How unclearly does he see race? He writes:

Black films looking to attract white audiences flatter them with another kind of stereotype: the merciful slave master. In guilt-free bits of merchandise like “Precious,” white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help.

There's a general truth to this but not as applied to "Precious." After all, what do the white people in the film, as mild as they are, do? They pass the buck. And that's all they do. It's black people—albiet light-skinned black people—who save Precious.

Reed saves his worst comment for the end:

It’s no surprise either that white critics — eight out of the nine comments used on the publicity Web site for “Precious” were from white men and women — maintain that the movie is worthwhile because, through the efforts of a teacher, this girl begins her first awkward efforts at writing.

Redemption through learning the ways of white culture is an old Hollywood theme.

What happened to "writin' is fightin'"? Now it's whitenin'. I can't think of a more harmful lesson.

Next time the Times op-ed has extra space they should give a forum to Jill Nelson. She didn't like the movie, either, but at least she was smart about it.

"On every single major issue of the day, [the Republicans] are incoherent. They have no workable plans to insure the uninsured and no practical way to contain healthcare costs; most deny climate change even exists; most seek to prolong wars because ... er, we have to be tough; their response to the massive debt is to defend Medicare and call for tax cuts; their position on civil rights is that gay people need to go to Jesus; their position on terror suspects is to detain them and torture them, violating domestic and international law; their position on immigration is to round up millions and force them to go home.

"My worry, however, is that there are enough Americans perfectly happy to live with this nihilism indefinitely, and to perpetuate the policies of spend-and-borrow and invade-and-occupy that any serious attempt to address our problems is impossible. And their response to that will be to blame all those problems on a Democratic president, if there is one; and if there's a Republican president, to simply deny that any of the problems exist at all.

—Andrew Sullivan, "Tactics Over Strategy"

After all the blather earlier this week from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the following is a breath of fresh air. My nephew, Jordy, age 8, disappointed that he hadn't seen more of my top 10 movies, recently sent me his top 10 kids' movies of the year. Third-generation movie critic! How about that? Looks like I've got some movies to see, too...

Top 10 Kid’s Movies from 2009! By Jordan

• 10. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs! – Because it has a great story from a book I know.
• 9.  Where the Wild Things Are – Again, a great story from a book plus great dialogue.
• 8.  Ponyo – Because my Dad said this has to be on the list.
• 7.  Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince – Because it has a great plot and is different from other Potter movies.
• 6.  Avatar – Great Graphics but may not be for kids.
• 5.  Planet 51 – It’s a good story and funny.
• 4.  Aliens in the Attic – Because it’s just funny.
• 3.  G-Force – It’s good dialogue and it’s like an action movie for kids.
• 2.  Monsters vs. Aliens – It’s a great story with great characters like Bob.
• 1.  Up! Because it’s funny.

Jordy knows what he likes; and knows what he doesn't.

• My sister forwarded this Washington Post article on the unintentioned heartbreak we caused the publisher of Orchises Press, Roger Lathbury, who was all set to publish J.D. Salinger's "Hapworth 16, 1924" in January 1997 when I discovered it on amazon.com in October 1996, wrote about it briefly for a Seattle Times publication, then told my sister, who wrote about it, more prominently, for The Washington, D.C. Business Journal. Her article was picked up by The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, etc., and the ensuing publicity caused Salinger to withdraw permission to publish. I wrote about my experience in the matter here. The Wikipedia version is here. My apologies to Mr. Lathbury—and to myself, since I would have loved reading "Hapworth" in book form, no matter what I ultimately thought of it. According to the article, it took Salinger eight years to agree to let Lathbury publish "Hapworth." If it had taken him six or seven, the book probably would've happened. Unfortunately, by the time he said yes we were in the dawn of the Internet age. And there are no secrets in the Internet age.
• Don't miss the Times' "Walking in Holden's footsteps" literary map of Manhattan.
• Here's Le Monde's version of the Salinger obituary.
• And here's my friend Andy's poignant take on the influence of The Catcher in the Rye.
• I also like this New York Times' piece on how "recluse" is in the eye of the beholder.
• I linked to this last week but it's worth linking again: Steven Lomazow's post on the early, uncollected Salinger stories that I wrote about here. The post comes from Lomazow's blog on "the history, importance and joy of magazine collecting."
• Finally, Charles McGrath did a nice job on Salinger's obituary for The New York Times, although I would've changed the lead to read: "J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II, at a time when writers, American or otherwise, were thought to be important, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91." That's part of the tragedy for Salinger and us. Apparently he couldn't stand all that attention on his writing; but if he'd simply waited a few decades his writing would've received all of the lack of attention he wanted.

The assumption has always been, my assumption has always been, that the increase from 5 to 10 best picture candidates is the direct result of low ratings, which is the direct result of the increasing divide between box office and the Academy, but an argument could be made that the problem is less the Academy's unpopularity (as measured by box office) than its predictability (as measured by Hollywood insiders).

I thought of this as Tom Sherak, president of the Academy, and Anne Hathaway, Julie Andrews impersonator extraordinaire, announced the nominees this morning at 5:40-ish a.m., Pacific coast (my coast) time. Actor: Bridges, Clooney, Firth, Freeman, Renner. Actress: Bullock, Mirren, Mulligan, Sidibe, Streep. Director: Bigelow, Cameron, Daniels, Tarantino, Reitman. It's everyone that everyone has been predicting. So how nice to hear, you know, "A Serious Man" and "Up" nominated for best picture. On the other hand, how awful to hear "The Blind Side" and "District 9" nominated for best picture.

There were some surprises in the other categories. Maggie G. taking away Julianne Moore's spot in the best supporting actress category. Matt Damon actually getting nom'ed for "Invictus," and Tucci actually getting nom'ed for "Lovely Bones." Damon's nom, for his duller performance in "Invictus" rather than his much more fun performance in "The Informant!," is reminiscent of last year, when Brad Pitt got nom'ed for his duller performance in that Netflix favorite, "Benjamin Button," while being ignored for his standout comic turn in "Burn After Reading." Plus ca change.

The big question about the 10 nominees (which, again, I'm agin), will be whether the sheer number of nominees will make the final winner harder to predict. Somehow I doubt it. My early picks for March 7:

• Picture: "Avatar"
• Director: Katherine Bigelow
• Actor: Bridges
• Actress: Bullock
• Supporting Actor: Waltz
• Supporting Actress: Mo'Nique
• Original Screenplay: "Inglourious Basterds"
• Adapted Screenplay: "Up in the Air"
• Foreign Language: "The White Ribbon"
• Animated: "Up"

Surprises shouldn't matter, of course. Quality should matter. At the same time, Hollywood, if anyone, knows that once you stop surprising, people stop showing up.

Full list of nominees here.

ADDENDUM: After looking over my own choices from yesterday, the big dark-horse disappontments, those actors that actually had a chance in hell of getting nom'ed, include supporting actors Alfred Molina in "An Education" and Christian McKay in "Orson Welles and Me" (once again, the Academy gives Orson Welles the shaft), and Cotillard getting no love for "Public Enemies." (But if Ms. Cotillard needs love, or just wants to help me with my French, I'm easy to find.)

Screenplays were interesting. I agreed with the Academy on four of the five for Original (I chose no-chance-in-hell "Funny People" over haven't-seen-yet "The Messenger"), while we agreed on only one of the five in Adapated ("Up in the Air"). I was on the fence for "An Education" anyway, and "In the Loop" is inspired for a change. But I'm not a big "Precious" fan; and "District 9" is way, way overrated, for all of the reasons I stated back in August. How much harder to adapt "Where the Wild Things Are," which is, in book form...15 pages? Twenty? And kids' pages? And where was "Wild Things"? I picked it in six of my nine categories. The Academy picked it in zero of theirs. I guess, in the end, that's not much of a surprise, either.

Zero noms? Time to roar our terrible roars and gnash our terrible teeth.

The Academy Award nominations will be announced tomorrow morning by Anne Hathaway, and the following aren't so much predictions as preferences. I tried to stay in those categories where I didn't feel too out of my element. Feel free to post your own picks, or protests, in the comments field below. Oh, and the pictures don't necessarily indicate preferences, either. Some are simply dark horses. Some are horses so dark no one can see them.

Best Picture (assuming a U.S. production)

• "Avatar"
• "Fantastic Mr. Fox"
• "The Hurt Locker"
• "The Informant!"
• "Inglourious Basterds"
• "A Serious Man"
• "The Soloist"
• "Up"
• "Up in the Air"
• "Where the Wild Things Are"

Best Director (assuming not)

• Olivier Assayas, "L'Heure d'ete"
• James Cameron, "Avatar"
• Joel and Ethan Coen, "A Serious Man"
• Spike Jonze, "Where the Wild Things Are"
• Steven Soderbergh, "The Informant!"

Best Actor (assuming Bridges; I haven't seen "Crazy Heart" yet)

• Jeff Bridges, "Crazy Heart"
• Matt Damon, "The Informant!"
• Robert Downey, Jr., "The Soloist"
• Colin Firth, "A Single Man"
• Max Records, "Where the Wild Things Are"

Best Actress (assuming nothing)

• Abbie Cornish, "Bright Star"
• Penelope Cruz, "Broken Embraces"
• Yolonde Moreau, "Seraphine"
• Carey Mulligan, "An Education"
• Meryl Streep, "Julie & Julia"

Best Supporting Actor (caveat: I never saw "The Messenger")

• Tom Hollander, "In the Loop"
• Christian McKay, "Me and Orson Welles"
• Alfred Molina, "An Education"
• Benoit Poelvoorde, "Coco Before Chanel"
• Christoph Waltz, "Inglourious Basterds"

Best Supporting Actress

• Marion Cotillard, "Public Enemies"
• Vera Farmiga, "Up in the Air"
• Catherine Keener, "The Soloist," "Where the Wild Things Are"
• Mo'Nique, "Precious"
• Julianne Moore, "A Single Man"

Best Original Screenplay

• Judd Apatow, "Funny People"
• Mark Boal, "The Hurt Locker"
• Joel and Ethan Coen, "A Serious Man"
• Pete Docter, Bob Peterson and Thomas McCarthy, "Up"
• Quentin Tarantino, "Inglourious Basterds"

Best Adapated Screenplay

• Wes Anderson and Noah Bambaugh, "Fantastic Mr. Fox"
• Scott Z. Burns, "The Informant!"
• Susannah Grant, "The Soloist"
• Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, "Where the Wild Things Are"
• Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, "Up in the Air"

Best Cinematography (Caveat: I only know so much)

• Barry Ackroyd, "The Hurt Locker"
• Lance Acord, "Where the Wild Things Are"
• Roger Deakins, "A Serious Man"
• Robert Richardson, "Inglourious Basterds"
• Dante Spinotti, "Public Enemies"

Best Documentary (Cavet: I only saw so many)

• "Anvil! The Story of Anvil"
• "The Cove"
• "The Horse Boy"
• "More than a Game"
• "Tyson"

Epilogue: The Fat Lady Sings

I have many more stories about J.D. Salinger, of course. In Mr. Wolk’s 10th-grade English class, we had to write mini-plays about one of the texts we’d read, and I wrote mine, or ours (it was a group project), about Holden Caulfield riding an elevator up Macy’s Department Store, making it, or trying to make it, all symbolic, with each floor representing an age of life. It was a disaster. In college I rediscovered the humor of The Catcher in the Rye and delved into the book several times a week. (One of my favorite lines: “I thought the two ugly ones, Marty and Laverne, were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn’t blame them, but it was very amusing anyway.”) I kept having discussions with friends about the best story in Nine Stories. Twenty years ago Pete said “Teddy.” Craig has rarely deviated from “For Esme.” I keep coming back to “The Laughing Man.”

When I interviewed Jeff Bezos in 1996, and he was informing me of the future—the Internet’s 2300 percent growth rate, the sorting capabilities of computers, the 1.5 million English-language books in print—I threw him off slightly by asking about the past, Hapworth 16, 1924, a then-31-year-old story that his Web site said was being published as a book in January. Bezos recovered nicely, though. You know how amazon.com makes recommendations based upon what you’ve bought or browsed? He was like that in the interview. I brought up Salinger so he kept bringing up Salinger. When I wondered how they weeded out frivolous customer reviews, for example, he said, “It's an incredibly small number of people who actually do that. We had God review the Bible. We had J.D. Salinger review Catcher in the Rye. It was very funny. The person who did that one actually had a terrific sense of humor.” I got the distinct impression, though, even as he spoke about him, that Bezos thought Salinger was dead.

When most famous authors die, pundits and obituary writers toss around some variation of the phrase, “A great voice has been stilled.” When J.D. Salinger died last week at the age of 91, it was opposite. Now that he’s dead, we hope he’ll talk. Are there more stories? Novels? Letters? Something? I can’t pretend I’m not intrigued. I followed him to his beginnings so I’m sure I’ll follow him to his ends. At the same time I know that a week doesn’t go by when he’s not talking with me already.

Here’s to Buddy. Here’s to the Fat Lady. Here’s to moving from one piece of Holy Ground to the next.

Part III: Seymour: An Erasure

During my year in Taiwan, British author Ian Hamilton published a thin biography called In Search of J.D. Salinger. It was thin because Salinger wasn’t talking, and neither were his friends, and neither, it turns out, were the letters Salinger had written to those friends in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, which Hamilton found in library collections at Harvard, Princeton and the University of Texas. They weren’t talking because it was ruled, in Salinger v. Random House, Inc., that while the letters themselves were public, Salinger still owned the words in those letters, and those words couldn’t be reprinted without his permission. Which, of course, he refused to give.

In Newsweek magazine, whose international edition I read in the Tien Mu library on the outskirts of Taipei, Walter Clemons took it upon himself to review not only Hamilton’s bio but Salinger’s oeuvre and his then-23-year silence. The review bothered me enough to write a letter to the editor. Here’s how it appeared, the second of three letters under the heading “In Defense of the Author”:

Walter Clemons writes of J.D. Salinger: “His work went to hell as he withdrew into solitude ... The sad fact is that one can’t hope that the work he’s done in his jealously defended privacy is likely to be very interesting.” No, one can still hope, Walter, despite your sad “fact.”

Erik Lundegaard
Taipei

It was Clemons’ language that pissed me off—his confusion of facts and hopes—but I didn’t agree with his opinion, either. I was still dazzled by Salinger; I hadn’t seen the pattern.

The best criticism I’ve read of Salinger is a cautionary review of Franny and Zooey by John Updike in 1962. Updike notes that in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”...

...Seymour defines sentimentality as giving “to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.” This seems to me the nub of the trouble: Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them.

In this same review, Updike writes that the Franny of “Franny” and the Franny of “Zooey” are not the same person. The former is a simple college girl going through a spiritual crisis because she found a book, The Way of the Pilgrim, in her college library. The latter is a savant, the youngest of the seven Glass children—each of whom appeared on the radio show, “It’s a Wise Child”—who got The Way of the Pilgrim, not out of her college library, but out of older brother Seymour’s bedroom. When Zooey admonishes his mother for not realizing where Franny gets her books (“You’re so stupid, Bessie”), it’s as if he’s admonishing Salinger himself, who got it wrong the first time.

All true. But it’s nothing compared to how Salinger kept changing his second-most-famous character.

When we first see Seymour Glass sitting on a beach in 1948’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” he’s a classic Salinger hero: skinny, pale, good with kids, a bit crazy. He could be Holden as an adult. Then he returns to his hotel room, lays down next to his wife and blows his brains out.

We don’t see Seymour again until “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” published in November 1955. In the interim, Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye and nine short stories (the other eight stories of Nine Stories and “Franny”), but it’s not until “Raise High” that we find out that some of the characters in these stories—Seymour in “Bananafish,” Walt in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” Boo Boo in “Down at the Dinghy,” and Franny in “Franny”—are actually part of the same family. The Glass family.

“Raise High” is about Seymour’s wedding, and his disappearance from same, in 1942, but Seymour himself is never shown. We only encounter him through the thoughts of the hapless Buddy, the second-oldest Glass child, and through excerpts in Seymour’s journal, which Buddy reads on the edge of his bathtub.

By this time, the quirky young man of “Bananafish” has become, in Buddy’s words, “A poet, for God’s sake. And I mean a poet. If he never wrote a line of poetry, he could still flash what he had at you with the back of his ear if he wanted to.” He’s a man conflicted between acceptance of everything and discrimination of, say, the best way to live, or the best poetry, and he bridges this gap with a kind of condescension. He writes of his future mother-in-law: “She might as well be dead, and yet she goes on living. ... I find her unimaginably brave.” We find out that when was young he threw a rock at a beautiful girl because she was so beautiful. He claims to have scars on his hands from touching people he loves. He’s either a crazy man or a holy man—or both crazy man and holy man—and Salinger hasn't showing his cards in the matter yet. We still have that tension. It’s part of why the story works.

“Raise High” is, in fact, one of the best pure stories I’ve ever read. It’s both rooted in the everyday and mystical. Its ending is so understated it doesn’t seem to end but continues to glide along into the unknown. He does this in 89 pages. In “Zooey,” published a year and a half later, a boy takes a bath and talks to his mother and sister. It’s 150 pages. The indulgence has begun.

“Zooey” is set in 1955, and, though Seymour’s been dead for seven years, he continues to grow. We find out he got his Ph.D. at 18. We get a glimpse of his poetry (“The little girl on the plane/ Who turned her doll’s head around/ To look at me”). The beaverboard in his old room is full of quotes from wise men and wise texts: Tolstoy, Epictetus, De Caussade, Ring Lardner, Mu-Mon Kwan, and The Bhagavad Gita. The tension between crazy man and holy man is dissolving, and, with it, story.

It’s in the next one, though, published more than two years later, that Salinger, the master storyteller, gives up on story altogether. It’s called “Seymour: An Introduction” but it might as well be called “Seymour: An Erasure.” Remember that poem about the girl on the plane? That’s actually Buddy’s translation of Seymour’s haiku, which was written in Japanese, one of dozens of languages Seymour knew. Remember the Seymour of “Bananafish”? That’s actually Buddy’s interpretation of Seymour, which he now admits was a little too much (“alley oop, I’m afraid”) like himself. By this time Seymour is no longer a crazy young man (“Bananafish”), or a poet, for God’s sake (“Raise High”); he’s one of the greatest poets in the history of the English language. And how could one of the greatest poets in the history of the English language write that crap poem about the girl on the plane? He couldn’t. Buddy did. Or Salinger did. But who’s Salinger? A hack compared to Seymour. The creation has outgrown his creator. Seymour has become too powerful to write about.

In order to even capture Seymour in “Hapworth 16, 1924,” published six long years later, Salinger has to shrink him back to the age of 8; and even here, pintsized, he’s so powerful Salinger can barely keep him on the page. Seymour may be a kid writing a letter home from summer camp, but the letter is over 100 pages long and includes sentences of Jamesian complexity. Story? Gone. Epiphany? What’s the point? Seymour is a reincarnated wise man now, increasingly aware of past, present and future. He accurately prophesies his own death. He talks about the other lives, or appearances, he’s lived, and the appearances of everyone else at the camp. So what can he realize that he doesn’t already know? How can he journey to a place he doesn’t already see? You understand why it’s the last thing Salinger ever published. He’s left himself, and his creation, nowhere to go.

Anyway that’s the story the fuss was all about.

Tomorrow: The Fat Lady Sings

Part II: My Summer of Salinger

I first encountered J.D. Salinger the way most of us did—when I was assigned The Catcher in the Rye in high school—but there was a time when I could read no one else. It was the summer of 1987. I’d just graduated from the University of Minnesota and was in love with a girl who was in Maine for the summer while I was about to leave for Taiwan in the fall. It felt like life was flowing in the wrong direction and I could do nothing to stop it. I felt bruised, and other authors kept pressing the bruised spots. Only Salinger consoled.

I didn’t re-read Catcher. I re-read Nine Stories and the Glass family stories, and then re-read them again. I read “Hapworth” in an old copy of The New Yorker my father had kept. I was so desperate I read a slim paperback, Salinger, published in 1962, which consisted of cold, critical thoughts on the author, but which contained references to Salinger stories I’d never heard of. “Personal Notes of an Infantryman”? “Slight Rebellion Off Madison”? The titles themselves sounded magical.

Turns out that before the nine stories of Nine Stories, as far back as 1940, Salinger had published stories, in magazines like Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post, that had never been collected in book form, and I found them at the University of Minnesota library. Throughout that long hot summer, I kept returning to its cool, fluorescent-lit stacks to read about ‘30s kids at parties (“The Young Folks”) and young married couples with problems (“Both Parties Concerned”).

It was hit or miss stuff. “Hang of It,” from 1941, concerns a World War I screw-up whose drill sergeant bellows at him, “Aincha got no brains?!” and the narrator sides with the drill sergeant. In the end we find out that the narrator is (“alley oop, I’m afraid,” as Buddy Glass would later write) the screw-up, now a colonel, and forever indebted to his loveable old drill sergeant. It’s the kind of thing Holden Caulfield would’ve torn apart.

War transformed Salinger’s writing. “The Stranger,” from December 1945, is blunt and unsentimental in comparison. “Your mind, your soldier’s mind, wanted accuracy above all else,” Babe Gladwaller thinks as he returns to New York to inform Vincent Caulfield’s girlfriend about his death. “So far as details went, you wanted to be the bulls-eye kid: Don’t let any civilians leave you, when the story’s over, with any uncomfortable lies.”

That’s right: Vincent Caulfield. He first shows up in “Last Day of the Last Furlough” from 1945, telling Babe: “My brother Holden is missing [in action].” Holden, not missing at all, not touched by war at all, shows up in two other stories from 1945 and 1946, while his much-imitated way of speaking—that repetitious, inarticulate way of circling closer to the truth, replete with I means and goddamns—shows up even earlier. In “Both Parties Concerned,” Ruthie leaves her husband, Billy, but she can’t stand staying at her mother’s place and returns. “It got me down,” she tells Billy. “I mean when I saw her looking so funny in her hair net again. I knew I wouldn’t be any good at home anymore. I mean not any good at their home.”

So many bells go off reading this stuff. In “The Varioni Bros.,” Joe, the more poetic half of a songwriting duo from the 1920s, dies horribly, tragically young—prefiguring Seymour Glass. In “The Stranger,” Babe’s relationship with his sister, Mattie, is right out of the Holden-Phoebe school. In “A Boy in France,” Mattie’s letter to Babe allows him to fall “crumbly, bent-leggedly, asleep”—as Esme’s letter would for a different soldier in “For Esme—With Love and Squalor.”

Eventually my love and need for Salinger became, like all loves and needs, stifling. I was reading 50-year-old stories that—beyond this epiphany or that moment of grace—didn’t take me anywhere I hadn’t been taken before, and better, by the same author. Occasionally I’d glance through these magazines to stories by the likes of Alice Farnham and Walt Grove and wonder whatever became of them. One issue of Story trumpeted the inclusion of “the 1944 Avery Hopwood prize novella, ‘Mexican Silver’ by Hilda Slautterback.” And it dawned on me—me who had such grand literary ambitions, but who had published exactly nothing—how hard it would be, not to be published and remembered like Salinger, but simply to be published and forgotten like Hilda Slautterback.

It was a Salinger reference that finally kicked me free from Salinger. In “A Girl I Knew,” the narrator mentions Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, and I sought it out. From there I read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and by then I was living in Taiwan and on a new trajectory.

Tomorrow: Seeing More of Seymour

My First Story with J.D. Salinger: Hapworthed

In October 1996 I was writing an article for a short-lived Seattle Times weekly about someone named Jeff Bezos who had started something called amazon.com, and, needing to see what a .com was, I biked over to my friend Ciam’s house and went online for the first time.

It would be interesting to see a screenshot of what I saw. I remember Ciam sat down at his desk and tapped on his computer keyboard, until, after some time, and even odder noises, he declared, “Here we are.”

I look over his shoulder and narrowed my eyes. “Is this on your computer?”

His explanations about what the online world was, I’m sure, fell noiselessly into some bottomless pit in my brain labeled “tech crap.” Once things go abstract I don’t quite get them, and if I understand the online world now it’s less because I get its abstractness than because I’ve transported its abstractness into the tangible world. Some part of my brain thinks reading online is as real as reading a newspaper.

“So what kinds of books do these guys have?” I asked.

Ciam shrugged. “Give me an author,” he said. I suggested Norman Mailer. I often went through phases with writers, and I was going through a Mailer phase now—even reading him chronologically—and I was pretty aware of all he had written. Or so I thought. After we typed in his name, some of the titles that came up dumbfounded me. The Bullfighter from 1967? Ciam and I were testing amazon but it felt like I was doing the failing.

So I suggested J.D. Salinger. Just four titles, right? The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction. Sure enough, we got those four titles in all of their various incarnations. We also got this: Hapworth 16, 1924.

“You’re kidding,” I said, staring at the screen.

“What?” Ciam asked.

“Hapworth. It’s the last story Salinger published—in The New Yorker in 1965—but it’s never been published in book form.” I motioned toward the screen. “Can you find out more about it?”

Ciam clicked on the link—a verb and a noun that hadn’t yet entered my vocabulary. Hapworth was due to be published by an outfit called Orchises Press in January 1997. Three months away.

“Wow,” I said. Initially I was more excited as a reader. Only slowly did I realize I had something of a scoop.

“Does anyone else know about this?” I asked, looking around.

The next time I spoke to my editor at The Seattle Times I mentioned the Hapworth discovery and suggested we do a separate story on it. Or at least a side-bar. The first J.D. Salinger book in 35 years! Think of it!

He didn’t share my enthusiasm. It’s not new? he asked. It’s just a reprint? he asked. “But feel free to put it in the story,” he added helpfully.

There are moments in life when you show what you’re made of, and, unfortunately, this was one such moment for me. I don’t remember my editor’s exact arguments but I accepted them in a defeatist way—as a door closing—rather than as what they were: a door opening. Since I was a freelancer, this editor had basically given me carte blanche to pitch the story to someone higher on the food chain: The Washington Post, The New York Times. But taking the individual for the institution, and assuming the institution knew what it was talking about, I folded.

Too bad, I thought. Felt like a story to me.

I did mention Hapworth to my sister. She had just gotten a job as a reporter with the Washington D.C. Business Journal, and, since Orchises Press was located in Virginia, I thought it might make a good local story. She ran with it. A few days after her article appeared, The Washington Post picked it up. A few days after that, The New York Times picked it up. About a week later, in the bookstore warehouse where I worked, National Public Radio, which we listened to all the time, did a feature on the excitement the new edition of Hapworth was engendering. I stood for a while and listened. In Don DeLillo’s novel, Libra, the CIA agent who suggests assassinating JFK is, by the time the assassination goes down, just a guy sitting in his basement going through his wine collection. He’s out of the picture. That’s how I felt—like I was on the wrong end of the radio. I listened for another moment before going back to shelving books.

The punchline? Perhaps because of the sudden media attention for Hapworth brought about by my sister’s story, Salinger withdrew permission to publish. Thirteen years later, the story still hasn’t been seen in book form.

Tomorrow: My Summer of Salinger

To put this in perspective: When James Cameron's "Titanic" became the worldwide box office champion with $1.843 billion in 1997-98, it more than doubled the previous record set by "Jurassic Park" in the summer of 1993: $914 million.

In the 12 years since, and despite rising ticket prices , no film has gotten within 60 percent of "Titanic"'s total. "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" reached $1.1 billion in 2003-04, the second (and awful) "Pirates" movie reached $1.06 billion in the summer of 2006, while "The Dark Knight" grossed almost exactly $1 billion two summers ago. Those are the only other movies that even reached the $1 billion mark. Basically halfway there. 

Until now. This week, "Avatar," Cameron's first movie since "Titanic," broke "Titanic"'s worldwide box office mark and currently stands at $1.861. And climbing. Fast.

Cameron's raising the bar when no one could even get close to the bar before. That's almost mean.