With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger: the literary father figure whom many of us would have been content to have left behind in junior high. Too bad the recurring themes of his work — suicide, loneliness, failure and questions of identity aren't limited to adolescence. It's been fifty years since The Catcher In the Rye was published, and his influence hasn't, for better or worse, started to wane. The essays in With Love and Squalor are, for the most part, smart and witty explorations of Salinger's role as a father to a generation of writers, and readers, who, as Thomas Beller writes in his essay, are going to "have to kill Daddy. Or love him. Or both."

Alexander Hemon, Walter Kirn, Jane Mendhelsohn, and Emma Forest, writers who are aware of what it means to be writing both in the shadow and space of Salinger, contribute the smartest and most lucid essays in this collection of fourteen pieces. "(W)e were all fucked by Salinger," English novelist Emma Forest writes in her essay "Salinger's Daughter: Whining Bitch": "He never rang, he wouldn't return our calls and he didn't even acknowledge our presence. He left no scent on the pillow. He wasn't even that good in bed. But he did get all of us our jobs." What emerges here, more than anything else, is a sense of frustration: frustration with Salinger's popularity, his critics, and the pervasiveness of his influence, especially in first person narrative.

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