Salinger and the Postmodern

Michael Greenberg an analysis of Salinger's work in 2010 which induced me to reevaluate the work of a man I had previously considered incurably juvenile. I suppose I am at fault for a shallow reading of Franny and Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye, but I can hardly be blamed. It seems to me everyone who reads Salinger either sees him as an adolescent prophet or a pretentious prig. However it would seem nearly every poorly informed view of Salinger, whether positive or negative, unthinkingly understands his obsession with "phonies" to be motivated by a sense that he himself is not a phony, an idea which people inevitably decide is true or woefully false. However, Greenberg, being infinitely more clever than I and my milieu, sees past so somatic a view, past the blunt surface interpretation I had, for so long, clung to. He proposes that Salinger's "obsession" with phonies, is rather more like a meditation on the concept of sincerity and intention. Salinger's work is that of the endlessly self aware postmodern author, the self-defeating, annular, obsessive morality of "freaks with freakish standards." Here is a link to the article. I you choose to re-examine some of Salinger's work I would strongly recommend pairing it with some of Robert Walser's work, who is certainly deserving of a post of his own, but for the time being I will say only that he has a similarly obsessive metafictional voice, a reductio ad absurdum, infinitely divided sense of morality, justice, penance, and sincerity.