I was really blown away by The Onion’s tribute to Salinger. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen in their pages, and that’s saying something. Not only is the irony spot-on, but they mimic his writing style brilliantly as well:
In this big dramatic production that didn’t do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud.
On a more serious note, the New York Times also ran a very nice tribute:
Nearly everybody loves “The Catcher in the Rye,” and most readers enjoy Mr. Salinger’s first collection of short stories, “Nine Stories.” But the work that followed, the four long short stories paired together in two successive books as “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” were less reader-friendly and provoked more critical comment, leading eventually to the retreat of the wounded author into solitude.
This was as much the consequence of critical failure as of authorial arrogance. These books challenged conventional notions of fiction and conventional ways of reading as radically as the kind of novels that would later be called post-modernist, and a lot of critics didn’t “get it.” The saga of the Glass family is stylistically the antithesis of “Catcher” — highly literary, full of rhetorical tropes, narrative devices and asides to the reader — but there is also continuity between them.
I’ve always felt like Catcher was overappreciated and Salinger’s other work underappreciated. That said, I’m also one of those who read but couldn’t get into his later stories. I did feel, though, that the failing was my own and not the author’s. I felt that there was a treasure trove there; I just couldn’t be bothered to look for it (and it does take some more looking, in those later works).
Not that some of the criticism wasn’t deserved or that critics shouldn’t be critics or anything, but Salinger’s experience on this Earth was really a heart-wrenchingly tragic one. An author who writes such a great and universally beloved book as Catcher in the Rye, then follows it up with Nine Stories, deserves to feel pride and satisfaction. Instead of enjoying his place as a canonical figure on the American literary scene, he ended up so wounded by critics of his later works that he retreated into solitude and never again shared his brilliance with the world. It’s appropriate to mourn his death, but in many ways we lost Salinger quite some time ago, and far too soon.