According to Seymour Glass, what some call a fool is really a person who seeks truth, a pursuit both artistic and holy. (When I was writing this review in a coffee shop, a harried medical resident in scrubs interrupted his latte run to ask in a worshipful tone, "Is that book about the author J.D. Salinger?") The real subject of the memoir is literary ambition. The agency is comically old-fashioned, a musty mausoleum of bookish gentility so hidebound that the staff doesn't use e-mail and regards even fax machine technology with the perplexed distrust of the apes in "2001: A Space Odyssey." Much of her time at work is spent responding to Salinger's fan mail, which she is forbidden to pass on to him: urgent, sincere letters from veterans and high school students and crazy people. Burdened with credit card debt and student loans, scraping by on $18,000 a year, she throws herself into her work, as well as into a self-destructive relationship with the world's worst boyfriend, Don, a cackling bad boy of Mephistophelian proportions. (Whether Seymour Glass would classify these people as fools or dopes the reader can decide.) With her gimlet eye for detail, Rakoff captures 1996 hipster Brooklyn perfectly, although these creative, aspiring, slightly ridiculous people are eternal types.
Reported by SFGate 13 hours ago.
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