Customer Reviews

Dream Catcher: A Memoir

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I bought this book to learn more about one of my favorite authors, JDS, and the book starts out like a biography of the man, sure enough. It's even a bit overly scholarly at first (footnotes, analysis of Jewish life in America, etc.) and I thought it was going to turn into a tedious read... But the book changes form several times as Peggy excorcises her demons and finds new reasons to keep writing it. You might have heard some of the debate of the ethics of writing this book while her old man is still alive. But, ultimately this book is about Peggy Salinger and not about JD. She is a troubled, deeply scarred woman who finally makes peace with herself and her father through the writing of this book, and that cathartic process unfolds beautifully as you read.

Of course you read this book because you're interested in learning more about JD Salinger, not Margaret Salinger. But the book is HER memoir after all, so you hear a lot about her and other people who aren't JD Salinger. Some of it is really interesting..you'd probably like it if you like reading about growing-up (I assume you do, since you're a fan of Salinger). You hear about how she and her friends transistion from catching bugs and watching old films with her dad to wearing make-up, and going to dances, and listening to The Beatles and all of that good sutff. But some things are pretty uninteresting, too. Dream Catcher is odd, because the author's writing style changes frequently.

Sometimes it's incredibly flower and unnessecarily wordy and downright dumb (she spends a whole page talking about her favorite lifesaver flavors and things) and it can be really irritating. Then it will suddenly switch to a very bare and personal style. It almost felt like reading "The Catcher in the Rye" at times. There are also many, many random quotations (from "alice in wonderland", ancient poetry, ect) all over the book. At chapter heads, foot notes (of which there are nearly 2 every page, and generally very unnessecary information.), and in the text itself.

But what you'll learn about JD Salinger is pretty key. She definitley has a fresh perspective on the whole deal. She talks about how her father told her the same thing that Zooey tells Franny ("There's no major changes between 10 and 20, or 10 and 80, for that matter."), and it ends up with her being molested by a college student when she was around 10. She thought of him as her "boyfriend" because she wasn't taught that there's a big difference between fooling around with boys her age and much older boys. Another time she writes about she and her father getting into an arguement when she was a very small child, and him telling her, "We'd better find a way to make this up, because once someone loses my respect for someone, that's it. We're through." She writes she has to constantly put on a front for her father; she has to be like Phoebe, Holden's perfect sister, or he'll become furious with her.

Margaret Salinger offers a lot of new perspectives on JD Salinger's philosophy. She is pretty blunt about it, calling her father's stories unrealistic and incredibly simplified. She talks about becoming angry at adults who agree with the things her father says, wondering how they can be so immature.

JD Salinger, according to Margaret, was also cruel to her mother. Keeping her a "virtual prisoner" in their tiny cabin in the deep country, and forcing her to adopt all of his constantly changing and demanding religious practices. Refusing to let her have any money to buy new clothes even when she needed them, because he thought women were vain and sinful and didn't want to encourage it. According to her mother, JD Salinger went out of his way to make her life terrible; (refusing an invite to dine with President Kennedy because she wanted to.)

He does seem to have real issues with women. Margaret writes about her coming home from camp, and wearing a new swimsuit. Her father is disgusted to see her breasts have started to develop. He gets angry when she shows even a slight interest in fashionable clothes.

I guess a lot of people who read this book disliked it because it painted such a negative view of JD Salinger (unrealistic, abusive, racist/sexist, control freak) but despite being a huge fan of JD Salinger, I thought it was really interesting. It certainly adds a new and complex twist to my thoughts when I read his books. As much as we love to read about the Glass family and all, couldn't it actually be incredibly traumatic to not give children the guidance and reality they need? Didn't JD Salinger write these books without having any idea of what children were actually like? And I guess this book answers those questions. Margaret Salinger and her brother went through a lot of unnessecary pain because of her father's unrealistic philosophy on children and life.

It's all really fascinating, if you don't mind me being sort of blunt.

The real proof of this book's quality is that it would still be an absorbing and uncommonly well-written memoir of a seriously screwed-up childhood even if no one had ever heard of J.D. Salinger. Of course, it would never have been published either, so let's get down to brass tacks. As an "expose" of The Creep Behind The Artist, the prosecution is scattershot (there's a wearisomely prolonged and ultimately unconvincing effort to define him as an actual cult leader of sorts) but eventually sways the jury. And unlike the unsympathetic Joyce Maynard, who managed to cash in with her story first, Margaret Salinger seems to me fully entitled to whatever degree of payback this book represents. (It's not a hatchet job but she's not afraid to let hard-earned bitterness show at times.) When, as a teenager, she finally begins to see his toxicity as a parent and writes in her diary, ...it's a real stand-up-and-cheer moment.

However, it must be acknowledged that the book is in desperate need of strong editing. The indiscriminate inclusiveness (i.e. the complete text of notes passed in junior high school) and irritatingly pointless footnotes (i.e. explaining where the chapter heading "To Sir With Love" comes from) are unfortunate deterrents to appreciating this book on its considerable merits.

This is unlike any "memoir" I've ever read. Margaret Salinger has included so much information here, historical, personal, and literary, it may be more than the average "kiss and tell" reader can fathom. The serious reader won't be disappointed. Margaret gives a bittersweet, yet balanced account of her childhood. Her childhood accounts show a real memory for the details, sounds, smells, and especially the visual beauty of life in the woods. She frames her father's development as a writer and links his work to events in his life. She has researched and explained her father's discomfort with his Jewish heritage .She frames it in the context of America anti-Semitism in the first half of this century. She tells of his restless search for transcendence from the pain of life with a series of fads. He eventually settles on a hodge-podge of Zen and Christian Science. All of life is fiction. (Except his needs!) Given the lengths to which her father's more unbalanced admirer's will go, she very wisely avoids discussing her current partner and lifestyle. It's clear she has discovered the happiness of the small things in life and is the kind of chaplain I would like to have. She's self-effacing and a real straight shooter. This honesty probably has cost her, but after her illnesses, her emotional needs, and finally, she herself became just another "illusion," she had lost her father long ago.

When we love a work of art, we instinctively believe in the goodness of its creator. I know very little about JD Salinger except I loved Catcher in the Rye. If you are like me, you might not want to read this book, because it will forever change your view of the book and its author. This is a book with too much disclosure about the Salinger family. You will never read Catcher again without realizing that every sentence is eeked out of a rather mean man who locked himself up in this fantasy life of being young and cool while being horrid to his family and being quite a fraud and an imposter, really. A picture of JD Salinger emerges - he becomes a recognizable archetype of everyone's least favorite uncle, with irrational hatreds and pretensions and a chilling inability to relate to children, his wife, or his family. After knowing how Catcher was conceived - sometimes, sentence by sentence - every note of that book will ring false forever. One wonders if other writers were similar jerks to their family. Maybe we don't wanna know.

Where's the editing in this book? While a memoir, by definition, presents facts (or not!) filtered through the author's memory, bias and interpretation, an editor or reviewer should still reflect upon the writing skills and organization offered to the reader. Unfortunately, Ms. Salinger offered the minutiae of her personal and family history in a way that was to the point in describing her tortured childhood, but often tediously anecdotal, and quite often ambiguous (did her mother beat her or was Peggy's memory lapse just that? Was Peggy clairvoyant? Was she her brother's protector or did she hate him initially as suggested by her father's comment?). Overall, the book suffers from a lack of structure and too many writing approaches - sometimes comic slang, sometimes well-written philosophical interpretation. It would be difficult to sum up Ms. Salinger's overall personal writing style. She almost sadly seems to attempt to copy her father's style at times. Her best approach, to me, is in the final section where she seems to combine both directness with deep, creative insight into her past and the characters inhabiting it.

Those looking for details of J. D.'s life and motivation should not expect to rely upon this memoir for facts. Either this accounting by Ms. Salinger was mis-advertised as such or, in my opinion, missed it's mark. The book is about Margaret Salinger, not J.D., and, as such, presents her journey from a perceived troubled childhood, through the not-so-unique emotional upheaval of adolescence - popularity, note-passing, boyfriends, some miserable teachers and loneliness (a la Holden Caulfield?), serious emotional and physical disabilities, to a final level of personal peace and acceptance of the fact that she apparently had miserable parents.

References to J.D. Salinger's writing were most often inserted into multitudes of footnotes, interrupting what written flow there was, but were haphazardly left in the text in other instances for no distinguishable reason. An ambitious initial and insightful attempt to relate Mr. Salinger's life's events to his motivation seemed to dwindle away as the memoir continued. Disappointment over this tactic arises not so much from the loss of interpretation but to the overall lack of focus and structure.

Catcher in the Why?

When asked why she wrote a book on her famous reclusive father, Margaret Salinger said it was not so she could write a "daddy dearest", but more of a "daddy why?". Why was J.D. Salinger so eccentric is really the cornerstone of this "memoir" and it is partially answered in an interesting account of his early life and family history. There is no doubt that Margaret, or "Peggy" as she is called, has inherited both a family talent for writing and a family "reclusiveness". She grants herself permission to delve into the private and personal life of her father under the guise of exploring her own life and making a better world for her son by not repeating the mistaken ideas of the past. Yet, she remains opaque and coy about herself and thus, there is an uncomfortable lack of resolution to the book for she fails to find herself which was ostensibly why she wrote the book. She can't jump over her own shadow. Most people can't. But most can't afford all the therapy and education she has pursued to do so. If you are going to announce that you are trying to get to the bottom of the "mysterious family curse" of silence and eccentricity then, you better come up with some sort of answer or we just went through four hundred some odd pages for nothing. And that's the problem: where there should be a crescendo in this memoir there is only a squeak because Salinger edits herself, or "catches" herself every time she is going to reveal something important about her own current state of adulthood.

Peggy feels free to talk about her father's relationships and by extension to take that information and examine why she has had so many bust-ups (one even leading to a suicide attempt on her part). Yet, when it comes to a moment where she should be giving an explanation of some breakthrough; how she came to choose her husband, she scarcely gives two sentences. All that we come to know is that he is from the Midwest and sings. She gives more space to a baby-sitter she had in junior high than what should be the most significant relationship she enters into aside from the one with her father. There aren't even any photos of her husband in the book so an observer could compare him physically with her father. She doesn't even give his last name, so we don't know if he is Jewish. She keeps daddy's name. (Now, isn't that telling?). Not that it matters to us...but it seems to matter to her to the extent that she purposely overlooks these details; these revelations of her own character which she purports to be exploring but then blithely glosses over as if we won't notice.

The same is true of her spirituality. Here, she goes into some detail on her father's dabblings in mysticism and religion and sites his long-standing sensitivity to being Jewish. But when it comes to fully revealing why she became a Chaplain, she is mum as to what "religion" or God she follows. All we find out is that she went to some ecumenical Episcopal church where it is not clear what they believe. She doesn't say precisely if she is following the Bible, Christ or some Jewish teaching. This is a central point in her father's life, and in hers, but when it comes time for her to "fess up" about why she became so enlightened as to be a Chaplain and what enlightened her exactly (was it the readings of Buddha? Augustine? What?) she is mute. This is somewhat unfair and infuriating because after all, she becomes a hospital Chaplain!! It is as if, like her father who once contemplated becoming a monk, she has found her own "monkdom" and fails to see that maybe her dad had something to do with that.

In fact, she seems to have little spiritual breakthrough at all. When she toys with the idea about writing this book she contacts a friend who has connections with other worldly "spiritual guides". This friend, via these "spiritual guides" must have given her a green light to fink on her dad. Peggy does not, it seems, have enough spiritual power on her own to get the signal. So what kind of a Chaplain is that, I ask you. (If I am in a hospital I want someone "connected" to explain the eternality of my soul, not just a well wisher.)

For all of his oddities and irascibileness, J.D. comes across as sort of likeable and a man fighting his own demons, trying very hard in his own way to tackle them. He has crazy notions of homeopathic cures for his kids when they get sick but at least he hits the books and tries to help them. How many dads do that? At one point Peggy accuses her dad of being neglectful. He corrects her. "Detached", maybe, but never neglectful. And he is right. That is what he was and for whatever reasons, Peggy has never ceased of wanting more from him than he was capable of giving. He admits these failings in the same way he makes objective pronouncements on some people in academia ("tin-eared" egoists) to people who quilt (they do not have "very fine minds").

Old J.D. hit a nerve in literary circles speaking through the voice of the adolescent, Holden Caufield, because he saw that most people can't make the leap into adulthood - they are stuck in a high school of emotions and reactions. By the end of Peggy's book you feel she is stuck there as well (more pages devoted to uninteresting junior high and high school pursuits than adulthood revelations like marriage, parenthood, dealing with the sick and dying in hospitals, etc.) and has become precisely what her father feared: a phony, an overindulged, needy, talented daughter who is detached from herself and unable to honestly examine and courageously proclaim what she has learned.

I bought this book a year ago and read it once and haven't touched it in the past thirteen months, so my observations might not be as sound as some others on here. But here's what I thought when I read the book: it needed just a little bit more editting. Peggy is a fine writer and she clearly conveyed to me how hard it was to live up to her family name and all, but I think the book was rushed to the presses too soon. She keeps going off on tangents. Like, towards the beginning she mentions her dad is Jewish -- then she goes off for several pages of statistics on what it is like to be a Jew in America, all sorts of information that has nothing to do with Peggy or J. D. as people. This is why I give this book four stars -- another go at the editor's desk and it would have been five.

This is just a biographical note. Margaret's mother is Claire Douglas, the editor, writer and Jungian analyst. Douglas did the Bollingen edition of Jung/Morgan's "Visions Seminars" given in Zurich in the early 1930's. Of more note, given Salinger's biography of her father, is one of Douglas' other books, "Translate This Darkness, the Life of Christiana Morgan." I'd say the three works--Salinger's biography of her father and Douglas's two works--make a terrific view into the world of writing, reflection, healing and empowerment.

This is unlike any "memoir" I've ever read. Margaret Salinger has included so much information here, historical, personal, and literary, it may be more than the average "kiss and tell" reader can fathom. The serious reader won't be disappointed. Margaret gives a bittersweet, yet balanced account of her childhood. Her childhood accounts show a real memory for the details, sounds, smells, and especially the visual beauty of life in the woods. She frames her father's development as a writer and links his work to events in his life. She has researched and explained her father's discomfort with his Jewish heritage .She frames it in the context of America anti-Semitism in the first half of this century. She tells of his restless search for transcendence from the pain of life with a series of fads. He eventually settles on a hodge-podge of Zen and Christian Science. All of life is fiction. (Except his needs.) Given the lengths to which her father's more unbalanced admirer's will go, she very wisely avoids discussing her current partner and lifestyle. It's clear she has discovered the happiness of the small things in life and is the kind of chaplain I would like to have. She's self-effacing and a real straight shooter. This honesty probably has cost her, but after her illnesses, her emotional needs, and finally, she herself became just another "illusion," she had lost her father long ago.