“Just Before the War With the Eskimos” (1948)

This story by J.D. Salinger, published first in the New Yorker in 1948 and later in his essential Nine Stories collection, seems likely to typify much that people don’t like about him. It involves a bunch of semi-miserable adolescents crabbing about things from the center of their vastly comfortable lives. Their circumstances vary—certainly in their self-consciousness they calibrate themselves on different levels in terms of wealth and class. But the high-school girls, squabbling over cab fare, attend a private school in Manhattan, and the two guys are college educated. I think? I see that some on the internet take one guy, Franklin, older brother of one of the girls, as a Jesus figure. That never occurred to me. He struck me more as an early version of Holden Caulfield (and let’s please not get into any Jesus implications thereof). He complains a lot and he’s quick to dismiss or judge people as snobs and phonies. Selena is Franklin’s sister and Ginnie is her friend, or anyway her nemesis on the cab fare issue. While Selena is in another part of the house very slowly getting Ginnie’s money, Franklin enters with a bleeding finger (just like Jesus!) and goes off on a monologue. Franklin is a few years older than Ginnie and I take the arc of this story to be Ginnie developing a crush on him. The recent war has a presence here. Franklin says he couldn’t get into the army because of a heart problem. He has been working at an airplane factory for three years. So I guess he’s not college educated? He comes across like he is, meaning, I guess, that he’s obviously intelligent and informed and a little neurotic. This story is basically very slight. Salinger makes it work with his voice and all the great dialogue. They are the two features that rarely failed him and always make him a pleasure to read. No, I don’t have much use for spoiled rich kids. But I know, with Salinger, with movie director Whit Stillman, and with a good many others, that they can be thoroughly entertaining in their pretensions to being wearied seen-it-all adults. For that matter, Salinger’s adolescents usually have profound undertones that are felt as much as read in the text.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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