Dream Catcher - A Memoir by Margaret A Salinger: book review

In Dream Catcher (2001), Margaret Salinger writes of her life as the daughter of the famous reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, author of the 1951 mega-best-selling novel The Catcher in the Rye. Margaret chronologically analyses her life through home, school, and university episodes, but the most enthralling snippets are her comparisons between real life and her father’s fictional literary works.

She describes the period when her father, Jerry Salinger, lived in a dark apartment with black sheets and black furniture. Readers could be forgiven for trying to compare this period of her father's life with the life of his character Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. Holden fears that he’ll sink into oblivion. But to say that her father based the fictional character on himself is “too straightforward, too linear and logical”, Margaret Salinger says.

Margaret Salinger is caught in a strange world where the boundaries between the fantasy and isolation of films, books and fiction, and the reality of her father’s life as an American iconic author are inextricably entwined. Perpetual childhood clashes with hyper-maturity as she writes simply of complex family dynamics. Precocity, innocence, perfection, and imperfection are strong themes in this memoir as she delves into her father’s reclusive life, a life where people are tolerated in homeopathic doses and ‘phonies’ are abhorred - and the affect it has on her own life.

It is an interesting read, fuelled only by my interest in her father as the best-selling author of one of the most influential and timeless novels of the twentieth century, and not of Margaret in her own right. Again, she has become subsumed by the fictional dream of her father as the harbinger of the ‘whole goddam’ notion of phoniness in American society.

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