Home » Film & TV » American Literary Cinema » BOOK REVIEW: RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS

BOOK REVIEW: RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS

© Emily Woodward

For millions of devoted readers, J.D. Salinger remains synonymous with The Catcher in the Rye. The author and his New Yorker stories -- most notably "Raise the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction" -- are apt to appear as mere extensions of the modern iconoclassic. Biographers have contested the view that Salinger "is one with his alter-ego, Holden Caulfield". Their efforts may, over time, prove successful in dispelling the author's Holdenesque mystique. Similarly, a close read of Raise High and Seymour may distinguish it, to some degree, from Catcher in the Rye.

Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction compiles two related stories which were originally published in The New Yorker. "Carpenters", the first and probably most appealing installment, is reminiscent of Catcher, in terms of setting and narrative voice.

Salinger has distinguished himself as a perennial New York writer. As the Big Apple set the stage for Holden's odyssey, it is central to this tale of wedding day blues. The protagonist, Buddy Glass, has arrived in town to attend the nuptials of his older brother Seymour. Buddy explains that he was previously stationed "in the post hospital at Fort Benning." The year is 1942 and he has contracted pleurisy, "a keepsake of thirteen weeks' infantry basic training." Like Holden, he has landed in New York just as his story is taking off. The city is Buddy's hometown, as it is Holden's. It functions, moreover, as a seed of discontent in both stories. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden speaks of how 'it just kills him' to be back in New York.

The forties' slang, coupled with the standard notion of the verb "kill," evoke the dual effects of harm and pleasure. While the return to New York brings pain to both Holden and Buddy, the city remains a source of pleasure and humor as well.

Like Holden, Buddy is a wise-ass with soul. With plaintive humor, he surveys the scene at the bride's house, after the groom has elected not to show.

At twenty minutes past four - or, to put it another, blunter way, an hour and twenty minutes past what seemed to be all reasonable hope - the unmarried bride...was helped out of the building...It was an excessively graphic moment - a tabloid moment - and, as tabloid moments go, it had its full complement of eyewitnesses, for the wedding guests (myself among them) had already begun to pour out of the building, however decorously, in alert, not to say goggle- eyed, droves.

The copyright of the article BOOK REVIEW: RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS in American Literary Cinema is owned by . Permission to republish BOOK REVIEW: RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.