Word: leapings
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...Salinger's last story, Hapworth, noted, quoting Proust: "A cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap never turn out to be as high as we had hoped." The tide has gone out; the factories of the Salinger industry have experienced vast layoffs; the author himself has not communicated with his readers for seven years. And Holden Caulfield-has his voice been muted by his creator's silence? What happens to a prodigy two decades after his debut, when he is pushing 40? An admirer can only hazard a guess...
...lorn, adolescent souls kicking around the bestseller list, why did 7 make the existential leap to Required Reading? I was writing a mad letter, not a petition. How did it acquire so many signers? I mean not just kids, but critics. Because I think they felt, as I did, that uncertainty was the American state of mind. Old Gertrude Stein on her deathbed sighed, "What is the answer?" And topped it with "What is the question?" You could go to literary distinction with that kind of exit line, and in a sense, that is where Salinger took...
...glad in a way, that I did write Redux instead of pulling ahead with it. This, again, was' a bit of a leap of the imagination--I haven't lived in Pennsylvania for a long time now and this Brewer is a rather different Brewer from the one in Rabbit Run--which was based on scenes in my childhood where I knew every wrinkle in the pavement. I still felt on solid ground in this book in a way...the next book will have to be a jump in the dark...
...book has been hailed for its portrait of 'Middle America.' Did the necessity to get that close to a man who is inarticulate and guided by mass culture to as great a degree as Rabbit require a similar leap...
...went to Harvard, it's true, and wasn't much good at basketball...other than that we're rather similar. I quite understand both his anger and passivity, and feeling of the whole Vietnam involvement as a puzzle, that something strange has gone wrong...but it's no great leap of the imagination to do that...