Salacious to Read In

I’m very lucky as my daughters still allow me to read to them.  Someday it will end.  But we’ll have logged in more than a few shelves by then.  And tonight I find myself flipping between two notably different worlds.  With my older daughter it is the charmed salons of the early nineteenth century Russian aristocracy.  Pierre, bereft of spine, has tossed his resolutions to the wind and is drinking wildly; gambling with abandon and hugging live bears in the opening scenes of War and Peace.  We’ll be with him for some time now, as he slowly, painfully and memorably matures.   How immediate, and familiar, how Western European, Russia feels among the overeducated elite of the nineteenth century. 

Usually it’s me that gets sleepy but I’m pacing myself pretty well this evening having invested in a nap a few hours back.  It’s my daughter who calls for lights-out.  The little one demands I read to her as well.  “I’m still up!”  “OK, OK.”  And now, it is some hundred and forty years later and I’m in a boy’s dormitory, with Holden Caulfield at his prep school he’s been thrown out of, somewhere in suburban New York. 

Now we’re dealing with boogers and farts and lots of swearing that must have been really salacious to read in 1945:  “You God damn moron.”  “What the hell happened?”  "About me for Chrissake!"  "All that David Copperfield kind of crap."  I am finding this at odds with my more recent memories of “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beams Carpenters” where the Glass prodigy children are similarly dissatisfied with the world, but complain in much cleaner prose.  Each child is frighteningly intelligent and it feels like a rare pleasure to be amidst them as they complain their way through life after “It’s a Wise Child.” 

My little one is asleep before Holden can get out of his “lousy” conversation with his loser roommate.  I’ll stick with it.  I was only twelve when I read the book for school.  As I recall they made me get a note from my parents, which meant I would absolutely read it. I seem to recall things get better when he gets out of Pencey Prep and up into New York City.