Review of 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
I read Raise High The Roofbeam again in 2021. It's his best work.
The two long short stories or novellas are night and day. Raise High The Roofbeam, is vintage Salinger. It's A Perfect Day for a Banafish and Franny and Zooey. He's able to take these strangers put them in car and make it work for 95 pages. The dialogue and social interactions are first rate.
Seymour is more difficult. Salinger has some stuff about not aiming and just shooting, or in this case writing. But I think he's trying to write bad on purpose. There are some great passages that are very self-reflective of the author or expose the phonies in the conformist society, classic Salinger. But the writing is as indirect as possible.
Salinger kept writing until his death. He published one other longer story after this Hapworth 16, 1924 ~25k words, which was also received poorly. …
I read Raise High The Roofbeam again in 2021. It's his best work.
The two long short stories or novellas are night and day. Raise High The Roofbeam, is vintage Salinger. It's A Perfect Day for a Banafish and Franny and Zooey. He's able to take these strangers put them in car and make it work for 95 pages. The dialogue and social interactions are first rate.
Seymour is more difficult. Salinger has some stuff about not aiming and just shooting, or in this case writing. But I think he's trying to write bad on purpose. There are some great passages that are very self-reflective of the author or expose the phonies in the conformist society, classic Salinger. But the writing is as indirect as possible.
Salinger kept writing until his death. He published one other longer story after this Hapworth 16, 1924 ~25k words, which was also received poorly. It's hard to tell whether he was being weird on purpose like Bob Dylan's Street Legal or just plain spent like Down in a Groove. We can still speculate if there is one more Time out of Mind out there but that seems to less likely every year that passes. If Salinger had one more left we'd have it by now and his decision to not publish after this most likely reflects a realization on some level that he was through.
