If you didn't read Adam Gopnik's postscript on J.D. Salinger in The New Yorker a few weeks, back, do so now. I know how difficult it is to write about Salinger's writing, and Gopnik gets to the heart of what made him unique and necessary. Some excerpts:

• “...his death throws us back from the myth to the magical world of his writing as it really is, with its matchless comedy, its ear for American speech, its contagious ardor and incomparable charm.”
• “...it was Salinger’s readiness to be touched, and to be touching, his hypersensitivity to the smallest sounds and graces of life, which still startles.”
• “He was a humorist with a heart before he was a mystic with a vision...”
• “But the isolation of his later decades should not be allowed to obscure his essential gift for joy. The message of his writing was always the same: that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unself-conscious innocence that still surround us...”
• “Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.”