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At Home in the World

At Home in the World

List Price: $17.95
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Unveiling the Secrets
Review: This book tells the story of a young girl who was preyed upon, seduced and then abandoned by an older man. Of some interest is that the older man, in this case happened to be well-known, the author J.D. Salinger, although that's not the focus of the story. Maynard was a precocious writer. Both of her parents were English teachers, and Maynard as a young girl sat in on many a writing lesson that her mother used to give at home for her college and high-school students. Thanks to this early training, as well as her innate talent, Maynard had published articles in Seventeen Magazine and The New York Times while still a teenager. After the Times article, which included a picture of her, came out, she received hundreds of letters in response. One of those letters was from J.D. Salinger, who warned her that there would be those who would complement her writing and then once they had gotten her trust would exploit her. She wrote back to Mr. Salinger, and they were soon engaged in frequent correspondence. One thing led to another, and within the year, Maynard had dropped out of college and moved in with Salinger, some 35 years her senior. Unfortunately, although Maynard was deeply attached to Salinger, the feelings weren't exactly mutual, and within another year, Salinger, without explanation demanded that she leave. Maynard was to spend the next 25 years trying to understand what had happened to her. When her own daughter turned 18, the same age she had been when Salinger first approached her, she felt she had to share her story at last, so that others might learn from it.

In the book, Maynard describes some of the personal turmoils that left her vulnerable to such an experience. She relates some of the advice that Salinger shared with her about her writing. She lets us see the good side as well as the bad side of the man, but this book is primarily about her-looking back to see where she came from and make sense of where she has arrived. Overall, the story is engaging and compelling.


Rating: 2 stars
Summary: More of that David Copperfield kind of cr*p.
Review: Depressing. J.D. Salinger pictured as he no doubt really is - a self centered jerk who has inappropriate attractions to younger women. Hard to enjoy his writing after reading this. I do admire her courage in writing this book- I just wish I hadn't read it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Spot the Phony
Review: This is a don't miss, one of the best autobiographies of the last decade. Joyce Maynard's subject, here and elsewhere, is Joyce Maynard. It is a subject she knows better than any other and, like the high Romantics, her study of the self (at its best) ripples out to encompass and illuminate a larger world. Here she is definitely at her best.

The experiences with Salinger add subsidiary interest and a touch of scandal, though her experiences within her family are also instructive. The hissy fits thrown by some reviewers demonstrate their preference for ignorance and secretiveness when one of their icons is in the dock. In an age of unending self-indulgence and self-reflection, not to mention the near total politicization of letters, one can hardly exaggerate the degree of hollowness in the claims that one should consider the art alone and leave the private activities of the artist behind closed doors.

As one of Amazon's astute reviewers noted, if you don't want your activities to end up in print, don't be so foolish as to seduce and abandon a journalist.

The most delicious dimension of the book is its subtext. What Joyce Maynard is, of course, doing, is rewriting CATCHER and recording the details of the discovery of the biggest phony of them all, the landsman as virtual child molester.

The blame-the-female-victim response of reviewers one might expect more from serves as a kind of coda, one that Joyce Maynard was surely shrewd enough to anticipate. They went for the bait like hungry trout, demonstrating their own phoniness and complicity in a literary culture obsessed with victimology but unable to stomach its realities when it hits just a little too close to home. Joyce didn't even have to turn on the lights which revealed their convenient forgetting of their own ideologies; they grabbed at the switch all by themselves.

One doesn't often see the joining of high Romantic practice with the techniques of the modern journalist. Here one sees them in ways so expert and so exquisite that all one can do is urge others to share the view. Get out your lamb patties and your homeopathic nostrums and watch one very cool customer play Spot the Phony.


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