J. D. Salinger’s Love and Squalor

NY Times Book Review: J. D. Salinger’s Love and Squalor

 

 

...“The Stranger,” with its haunting echoes of Fitzgerald. Listen to Babe Gladwaller, home from the war, examining a pile of records:

“His mind began to hear the old Bake­well Howard’s rough, fine horn playing. Then he began to hear the music of the unrecoverable years . . . when all the dead boys in the 12th Regiment had been living and cutting in on other dead boys on lost dance floors: the years when no one who could dance worth a damn had ever heard of Cherbourg or St.-Lô, or Hürtgen Forest or Luxembourg.”