At first glance it doesn't seem much on which to base a memoir. Fresh out of college, Joanna Rakoff lands a job assisting JD Salinger's literary agent. She speaks to the great man on the phone several times but meets him only once. From that experience Rakoff has managed to conjure a book she has called My Salinger Year (Bloomsbury).
It doesn't tell us very much more than is already known about the great and famously reclusive author, but My Salinger Year is insightful and revealing in other ways. It is a coming-of-age story and an account of the end of an era.
Rakoff arrives in New York dreaming of becoming a poet. To pay the rent she finds a job at the oldest literary agency in town, Harold Ober Associates -- which she refers to in the book as "the Agency" -- as an assistant to the woman who represents Salinger.
It is 1996 but in the dark, book-lined rooms there are no computers, only a pedal-operated Dictaphone and an electric typewriter on which Rakoff must tap out the stock response to the Salinger fan letters that flood in from people touched by his work. Some are written in the style of Catcher In The Rye's Holden Caulfield, others share intensely personal feelings. To all of them, Rakoff is to say the same thing: Mr Salinger does not wish to receive mail from his readers. She cannot forward any notes to him. By day, Rakoff types away in the antiquated offices, by night she hangs out with her unsuitable boyfriend, Don, who is writing an intense novel. She gets around to reading Salinger's work and finds herself as affected by it as any of the fans whose mail she opens. She is involved in a bid to publish a Salinger book that never comes off.
