J.D. Salinger reviews RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

The Letters of Note website has posted an interesting letter that J.D. Salinger, the recently-deceased author of The Catcher in the Rye, wrote in 1981. In it, the reclusive writer offers his take on Steven Spielberg's hit of the day, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Have seen no good movies, except The Last Metro, which wasn't exactly indelibly fine, but Deneuve herself maybe was, or came close. I got hooked into seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, which might be excused for its unwitty, unfunny awful socko-ness if it had been put together by Harvard Lampoon seniors. I'll coast on the Deneuve performance the rest of the summer. She was always a good actress, but had never seen her with all this much restraint and finesse.

Salinger's remarks have gotten the internet nerdosphere all stirred up. "God forbid it not properly stimulate his cerebral cortex and just entertain him," writes a Catcher-hating commenter who calls himself Holdensucks. "When did this country become such a bunch of whiners?" (Actually, you're sounding pretty whiny there yourself, Holdensucks.)

Personally Salinger's opinion of Raiders doesn't really affect me much. But reading the rest of the letter would seem to suggest that Jay Mcinerney was right when he suggested those unpublished stories that have been languishing in Salinger's vault for all these years might not live up to fans' expectations. Salinger's later fiction just gets weirder and wordier, and I've always had the feeling he stopped publishing just in time. Reading that letter, I could all too clearly picture it being written by Buddy Glass as a cranky old man.

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