At times, frankly, I find it pretty slim pickings, and that time, I must inform my old fair-weather friend, the general reader, that it is now.
Fans of J. D. Salinger will recognize not just one, but two phrases in that sentence that I purloined from the much longer, more interesting, and better-crafted opening sentence of Salinger’s idiosyncratic, unique, and beguiling novella, Seymour: An Introduction. Salinger remains beloved among his fans despite the fact that he published just four small books, for cryin’ out loud, in the middle of the twentieth century, one of which (The Catcher in the Rye) is still handed out to middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, heavy with the mantle of a “classic.”
Those who love Salinger’s writing still cherish all four (the others being Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction) so much that they (okay, we) have been waiting, more or less patiently, for fifteen years now for the books to start appearing that he presumably wrote between 1965, when he stopped publishing and withdrew entirely from public view, and his death in 2010.
By his own account, Salinger loved writing but hated publishing. So he stopped the one but never stopped the other. A woman with whom he was close said that by 1972, he had completed two new novels. When Salinger died, a neighbor revealed that the writer had told him that he had fifteen novels finished.
By 2013, the buzz was extremely specific. The Guardian reported that “five new Salinger books are expected between 2015 and 2020.” They even had the titles, although they were mostly colorless and on-the-nose enough to invite skepticism. These were The Last and Best of the Peter Pans, which actually dated from 1962; A World War II Love Story, about his first marriage; A Counterintelligence Agent's Diary, about his wartime experiences; A Religious Manual, “about Salinger's relationship with Advaita Vedanta Hinduism”; and The Complete Chronicle of the Glass Family, the large and brilliant crew that features in several of the Nine Stories, as well as in Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.
In 2019, Salinger’s son, the actor Matthew Salinger, heaped scorn upon the 2013 report, saying that the claims about the books that were coming were “total trash…. They have little to no bearing on reality.” He added that “anyone that understood my father at all would find the idea hysterically funny that he would write a book about his first brief marriage. It’s so far beyond the realm of plausibility.” And indeed, 2020 came and went, and none of these books appeared.
Yet Matthew Salinger also assured a waiting world that “most all of what he wrote will at some point be shared with the people that love reading his stuff.” But why hadn’t it appeared already? “It’s not ready. He wanted me to pull it together, and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time. This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. So there’s not a reluctance or a protectiveness: when it’s ready, we’re going to share it.”
On Oct. 25, 2023, Matthew Salinger told the Spanish-language El Diario: "It will be published as soon as it's ready. If I keep going at this pace, in about two years." He also teased the coming books, saying, “I can tell you that there will be surprises for both scholars and readers. I'm thinking of 'serious' readers. For someone looking for the latest bestseller or the book to lie on the beach with, maybe not so much.”
Well, that two-year mark is coming up in two weeks, and I’ll venture to predict that there will by then be neither any new J. D. Salinger books, or any news about when, if ever, they might appear. Yet the arrival date may have been pushed back farther: Smithsonian Magazine stated in 2019 that “Matt Salinger reveals... he and the author’s widow, Colleen O’Neill, are striving to release these unseen writings to the public once and for all—ideally at some point during the next decade.”
So… maybe we’ll see something by 2029. Or maybe not. The long delay invites speculation. It seems certain at this point that J. D. Salinger did not leave behind finished manuscripts in a conventional sense, whatever he told his friends or neighbors, and that his later writing has required much more editorial work than would ordinarily be the case. It may also be that he left behind conventional novel writing, or fiction writing, or any kind of writing to the extent that the later work is simply unreadable, or perhaps not even immediately recognizable as coherent.
After all, his last publication, a novella called Hapworth 16, 1924 that appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1965 and was never collected or republished, is a largely charmless, sprawling thing that removes Seymour Glass, the protagonist and/or focus of several of Salinger’s published works, from the realm of humanity and makes him practically a demigod, a much less interesting figure than the wise, noble, and yet flawed human being that he had been initially.
So maybe there’s nothing really to wait for at all. Or maybe not. But if Matthew Salinger delays much longer, there will be no one still alive to recall why they so hotly anticipated the new books in the first place. At least he could, out of the goodness of his heart, offer us just one cool lima bean. He will know what I mean, and if you love J. D. Salinger's books, so do you.
