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What if Salinger had died at the Updikean age of 75.8, like the average American man?  What if Salinger had died in 1995 and his works that will be published over the course of the next three years had actually appeared before The Royal Tenenbaums and Garden State and the early ’00s acid rain of improbably-eccentric/impossibly-cool specters of fictional youth turned everyone sour on depictions of the minor angst and precious myopic aloofness of one’s first quarter century that were profound when we all had them but trite once we all read a dozen books about other folks having them?

Salinger may or may not have invented this genre, but it exploded and imploded within his lifetime, arguably within the last fifteen years of it.  If he had died earlier and we had be able to read the rest of his Glass legacy under his direction, we probably wouldn’t have become so exasperated with it, under others’.  The bad news is, he lived long.  The good news is, fuck did he care?