Trying to get to know the most unknowable of authors - Joanna Rakoff

Joanna Rakoff has written a romcom - with the reclusive JD Salinger as the source of her affections
Discovering JD: Joanna Rakoff had initially dismissed Salinger’s books as “insufferably cute, aggressively quirky, precious”
William Moore5 June 2014

My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff (Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99)

Anyone who can remember the fear of feeling hopelessly out of their depth in a first job should get a kick out of My Salinger Year, Joanna Rakoff’s mini-memoir detailing her brief time as an assistant for a New York literary agency in the mid-Nineties.

After bluffing her way through the job interview, flustered by the prospect of using a Dictaphone (“I had never even heard of such a thing…It sounded like something out of Dr Seuss”), she dives in to secretarial duties. The agency is never referred to by name, nor is her initially intimidating boss who first appears “swathed in whiskey mink, her eyes covered with enormous dark glasses, her head with a silk scarf in an equestrian pattern”. Other character names are changed but one figure who features unaltered is her boss’s most prestigious client, JD Salinger.

“Jerry”, she is repeatedly told, is not to be bothered under any circumstances. “He doesn’t want to read your stories. Or hear how much you loved Catcher in the Rye.”

But Rakoff has never read Catcher in the Rye or, indeed, any of Salinger. She believes her “Salinger moment” passed her by as she reached adulthood and she dismissed his books — with titles such as Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut and character names such as Boo Boo — as “insufferably cute, aggressively quirky, precious”.

But she is intrigued by the impact Salinger’s work has on his millions of readers. One of her duties is to read and reply to the piles of Salinger fan mail, mostly sent by angsty teenagers who identified with Catcher’s Holden (they parrot his vocabulary in their letters: “goddamn”, “crumby”, “phony”, etc) and view Salinger as a kind of confessional booth.

The agency is defiantly old-school, convinced that computers are a passing fad, so Rakoff has to write up the same dismissive stock response by typewriter for each letter. She soon ditches the template and goes off-script, composing the sorts of answers she thinks Salinger would approve of.

Anyone looking for gossipy insights into Salinger’s life won’t find them here. He makes but one appearance in the book — unsurprising for someone so famously reclusive — though he does sometimes bellow to Joanna down the phone (due to deafness, not temper).

It’s hard to know what Salinger himself would have made of Rakoff’s homage, so used must he have been to people telling him his books changed their lives.

Rakoff’s prose is precise and often amusing. Her patronising boyfriend, Don, makes a great love-to-hate character; dismissing her tastes as “so bourgeois” and using his schoolyard socialist ideals as an excuse not to buy anyone birthday presents. He also fancies himself as a writer, though Rakoff keeps her summaries of his stories brief: “Panties are ripped. Otherwise, not much else happens.” I wanted to reach into the pages and slap him. She moves in with useless Don, struggling to pay bills and rent and all the while trying to forget her far superior “college boyfriend”.

But the real will-they-won’t-they romance is between Joanna and Salinger’s books. We know they will, of course. But isn’t the suspense what makes a good romcom?

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