Word: glassful
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...years later into the neurotic chatter of Woody Allen's New Yorkers. But Salinger bent it all into something new, a tone that drew from the secular and the religious, the worldly and the otherworldly, the ecstatic and the inconsolable. It's customary to assume that the seven Glass children - the Glass family, an intricate hybrid of showbiz and spirituality, was Salinger's other enduring creation - make up a kind of group portrait of Salinger, each of them a reflection of his different dimensions: the writer and the actor, the searcher and the researcher, the spiritual adept and the pratfalling...
...first of that early trifecta of New Yorker stories was "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in which we first meet Seymour, the eldest of the Glass children. It's the last day of his life, and he appears in just the final pages, talking with a little girl on a beach in Florida - one of the many radiant children in Salinger's work - and bringing her out into the ocean in a fond but also slightly dangerous way, and then returning to the hotel room where his new bride, who has been on the phone earlier assuring her mother that...
...Salinger, abruptly entered a brief marriage to a graduate of the Harvard Business School, then fled back to Salinger. Salinger poured his feelings about that relationship into a long short story that was published in the New Yorker two weeks before their wedding. "Franny" is about one of the Glass sisters who realizes that she can't abide the jerk she's dating, a smug young Ivy League academic, and flees to the bathroom of a restaurant where they're eating to seek the refuge of an endlessly repeated prayer...
From now on Salinger would write only about the Glass family. "Zooey" was the story of how a Glass brother, the actor Zooey, tried to illuminate sister Franny about the pros and cons of the material world after she breaks up with her Ivy League boyfriend. In "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," another Glass brother, Buddy, a writer who is one of Salinger's various stand-ins for himself, thinks back on the uproar of Seymour's wedding day. Then in 1959 came the epic-length "Seymour: An Introduction." In a story full of all kinds of narrative wanderings...
...continued. I shielded my eyes to see a little girl, maybe 5 years old, bloodied in the face and moaning, being carried down the stairwell to an employee exit from the hotel. It was then I saw my hand covered in blood from the tiniest of cuts from flying glass. Guilt twinged in me. Would the Iraqi survivors see me, a foreigner, one of the presumed American targets, as somehow responsible...