The Architecture of Snow

INTRODUCTION

Few authors had the mystique of J.D. Salinger. In the mid-1960s, having written four much-discussed books, one of which was already being treated as a classic, the revered author of The Catcher in the Rye stopped publishing and withdrew from public life.

He never explained why, but a few possibilities come to mind. His final book, a pairing of novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, received mixed critical reactions. Perhaps Salinger’s personality was as fragile as the name of his fictional Glass family implied. Perhaps he decided to stop exposing his work to reviewers and preferred to retreat to a simple life where he listened to “the sound of one hand clapping,” a Zen Buddhist phrase that he favored.

For whatever reason, his walled compound in the remote town of Cornish, New Hampshire, acquired the reputation of a hermit’s lair. Fans who made pilgrimages to the area reported occasional sightings of the lean, aesthetic-looking author, based on a solitary, long-ago book photograph that they had studied. But over the years, these sightings became more rare while the citizens of Cornish closed ranks, refusing to reveal the little information they had about him.

The few reports that surfaced indicate that during the next four decades Salinger wrote obsessively every day and that he had stacks of completed novels in a large safe in his home. In January of 2010, he died at the age of 91. It remains to be seen if those novels will be published. Perhaps they never existed. Perhaps he destroyed them before his death. Perhaps they’re unreadable. Or perhaps they are masterpieces, the publication of which will come as unexpectedly as his withdrawal from public life.

These thoughts intrigued me long before Salinger died. In 2004, as I considered the way publishing had changed since my debut novel, First Blood, appeared in 1972, I wondered what Salinger would make of the international conglomerates that now control the book world. Publicity has become as important as editing. Marketing is often more important than content..

How would a modern publisher react, I wondered, if-out of nowhere and after so many years-a new Salinger manuscript arrived on an editor’s desk? I called the author by another name, and the circumstances of his withdrawal are different, but anyone familiar with Salinger will recognize the inspiration for “The Architecture of Snow.”

David Morrell