Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction

I'll admit it; I'm a bit of a bibliophile. I was in a thrift store in Idyllwild and I saw this beautiful worn navy clothbound book with delicately ivory-aged pages and barely discernible gold lettering on the spine, and I impulsively emptied my wallet of its change. I try not to be so shallow, but sometimes my book-love gets the better of me. The typeset is gorgeous.

The text itself wasn't too bad, either. I did Catcher in the Rye, failing to be scandalized by the language and coming away from it merely with a strong sense of pity for Holden Caulfield. This book was rather different. Salinger crafted essentially a lengthy character study, the view of a man through the eyes of his brother. The first section introduces Buddy Glass, a young soldier on leave during World War II attending his brother Seymour's wedding. Seymour never shows at the ceremony, and Buddy finds himself in a traffic jam with unfamiliar wedding guests. They abandon their taxi in favor of Buddy's apartment, have a drink, and disperse. All throughout the story, Buddy reminisces and muses over his brother.

This strain is continued in the next section, the official "introduction" to Seymour. The Glass family had a history in entertainment, and all the children appeared regularly on a radio quiz show. They were rather precocious, with a penchant for languages. Seymour was in college at sixteen and teaching at twenty. He was a prolific poet and philosopher, with the typical Oriental sympathies of the mid-twentieth-century intellectual. He ended up eloping with the bride whom he stood up that same day, and he committed suicide six years later.

Buddy is in his forties as he narrates this second section. Hr adores his deceased brother to a point of excess. He considers him an unparalled poet and a foremost thinker of his generation. The reader, or this reader anyway, has little upon which to form an agreement with him. Buddy's rosy rememberances are nice and witty, but involve perhaps too much telling, and not enough showing. Interesting about their relationship, though, is the way Seymour would write notes to Buddy critiquing his writing. They were so very literate, these brothers. Prentiously, delightfully, literate.

Salinger tried very hard here to create a fascinating, memorable character or two, but the sum total left only the slightest impression on me. It was all just so inconclusive. Why is committing suicide so profound? What exactly were Seymour's beliefs, and upon what did he base them? Why did Salinger write this book? The quasi-philosophical meandering intellectualism begins to sound like so much white noise.