There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddamn secret yet? And don’t you know — listen to me, now — don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? ... Ah, buddy. It’s Christ himself. Christ himself, buddy.

— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Literally millions of American young people continue to read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye. Far fewer read Salinger’s other books — Franny And Zooey, Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters, and Nine Stories — because they are less typically on a high school reading list, but all are still in print and enjoy steady sales some 50 years after their publication.

Why do so many people, particularly the young, still feel drawn to Salinger’s work? Certainly the author himself has done little to boost sales, except perhaps by backing into the spotlight; Salinger hasn’t published a story in decades and remains the most reclusive, the most secretive of American writers. Ardent fans pray that the elderly Salinger has continued writing over these many years, particularly about the Glass family, but no one except those very close to Salinger — and there don’t seem to be many people close to Salinger — has even a hint as to what he has put onto paper in all these years.

No, what attracts young people to Salinger’s books, other than the heavy hand of a high school English department, is that Salinger speaks to the hearts of the young. Holden Caulfield in Catcher In The Rye, despite the 1950s setting and dialogue, remains the quintessential youthful searcher, the idealist seeker of truth in a “phony” world, confused by the differences in the way things are perceived and the way they really are.

“Lawyers are all right, I guess — but it doesn’t appeal to me,” I said. “I mean they’re all night if they go around saving innocent guys’ lives all the time, and like that, but you don’t do that kind of stuff if you’re a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys’ lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys’ lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddamn trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren’t being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn’t.”

This youthful attraction to Salinger is one of the themes of With Love And Squalor, a collection of essays about Salinger by 14 young American writers in which they explore the influence of his stories on their own work. All of these writers are under 40 years old — several are under thirty — and all of them write well. Although some books of essays regarding the work of a single writer are either academic to a fault or offer songs of praise rather than real critique, With Love And Squalor includes an array of non-academic opinions about Salinger and his work.

Amy Sohn’s essay is a short story titled “Franny And Amy” that acts as both Salinger spoof and Salinger tribute. Like Franny, Amy meets a man for a date; like Franny’s date, Max is a little dense and very much self-absorbed. Aleksander Hemon looks at the Glass family, Zen, and Salinger’s depictions of children, concluding that Salinger in his writing about the Glass family embraced spiritual phoniness. To read Salinger is to conclude “... you can find Jesus or the Buddha anywhere, including the stock market or a soap opera, as long as you search for them or it.” Thomas Beller takes a strikingly different point of view, discovering in Salinger that “... the important details are communicated almost through something like clairvoyance, a kind of spiritual, nonverbal energy, transmitted by certain objects, that emanates from certain people.”

One aspect of Salinger’s work that these writers failed to address, possibly because they are so young, was how he captures so well those days right after the Second World War until the late 1950s. His take on everything from jazz to prep school talk, from the clothing to the cigarettes, is perfectly rendered here, a sort of enormous snapshot of this period and place captured in beautiful prose.

With Love And Squalor, ably edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller, should prove a real treat for Salinger fans.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)