The Narrow Door Read Online Free PDF

apartment. You’re living on nothing but the little bit of the Coca-Cola you ration daily for yourself. You’re still calling out for help, even though you sense your rescuer isn’t anywhere near. You’re just doing it to move your throat membranes, because it feels better to move them than to keep them still. That movement keeps them from hurting, drying up from the dust. Then a relief worker from France hears you calling, but barely. He sees a puff of your black hair when you’re probably minutes from your own death, and he starts digging. Digging and digging and digging, with such noise and activity and a plea for you to hold on (is he digging you up, or is he digging himself up?) that you’ve forgotten how thirsty you are, how your tongue feels like a wood chip in your mouth, how your skin hurts when anything rubs against it. And not much later, you’re part of a story that’s not even about you any longer, but the absurd spectacle of reporters, relief workers, and your fellow citizens cheering and applauding your dusty body as it is hauled into the back of an ambulance.
    And as for J. D. Salinger, who dies today?
    I’m in the middle of writing the previous paragraph—I’ve distracted myself by looking at Twitter—when the news comes in. It takes a good twenty seconds to hit, and when it does, I stop writing. My attention isn’t capable of much, even as I wonder whether my reaction is authentic. Perhaps I am enjoying the private theater of it all—luckily I’m all alone in the house today. Maybe my body just needs to weep. Maybe I haven’t even wept since Denise’s death. I have become a little hard these days, my bullshit detector extra-refined, scalpel-sharp. I’m wary of any writing that wants to provoke tears, any gesture that has the slightest stink of familiarity about it. Anything that asks the reader to say yes to some received truth.
    So what is it I’m doing? Why do I step aside from my story to start digging up quotes from Salinger’s work? As soon as I find them, I post them, and watch in wonder as people comment and pass them around:
    Maybe there’s a trapdoor under my chair, and I’ll just disappear.
    — Franny and Zooey
    Life is a gift horse in my opinion.
    — Teddy
    Seymour once said to me—in a crosstown bus, of all places—that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.
    — Franny and Zooey
    The depths these quotes sound. Brashness and tenderness and crankiness and love. Self-absorption and loneliness, the loneliness of the unheard, the unseen. The cadence of plain speech, expressive and overwhelmed, overstimulated. A voice that’s been so absorbed into American literature that you can’t even hear it as distinct anymore. How far that voice seems from the cool, neutral tone of minimalism. A week or so later I’ll pick up the New Yorker and read Adam Gopnik’s tribute and find two quotes that will seem to say everything—at least for that moment:
    The message of his writing … [was] that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech and childlike enchantment.
    It was the comedy, the overt soulfulness, the high-hearted (to use an adjective he liked) romantic openness of the early Salinger stories that came as such a revelation.
    The other revelation, the visceral revelation bringing about those tears, is that those stories fed us once: Denise, me, Famous Writer. All the way from the tone and characters to the constellation of names. Our work spoke back to that work: it paid it homage. How could we have forgotten that? Maybe it is just that Salinger was the voice of youth, and it was inevitable that we’d outgrow that voice as our interests turned toward the work of adulthood.
    But my guess is that there’s another explanation. A voice goes out of fashion. A voice gets associated with popularity, which