In which Mark falls prey once again to self-parody, and France barely makes an appearance at all

Like most mornings, I woke up at 6:00, while Quincy and the kids were still asleep and the sun had yet to rise. I spent the next hour or so sitting on the couch with my computer on my lap, drinking coffee, and reading The New Yorker. Riveting reading, as always. A lot of stuff about J. D. Salinger who'd died just a few days before.

Laptop computer. New Yorker. Salinger. Yeah, I know: I'm not exactly ripping off A Year in Provence here. I'm not exactly inviting any lawsuits from goddam Peter Mayle. That's the thing about digital technology, I guess. We're living in a house that's hundreds of years old, but it's outfitted with a high-speed wireless internet connection. So, with a computer on my lap, I could just as easily be back in Vancouver, or anywhere else in the world.

Anyway, I got to thinking about Salinger and his writing that I like so much. I was reminded of how I was inspired to write a couple of Holden Caulfield parody pieces back in the 1980s, which actually found their way oddly into print (in the Daily Tar Heel and the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity – not exactly The New Yorker, of course, but, as Richie Brockelman might have said, what the hey), and which I wrote mostly to amuse myself and a few friends. I was reminded of how, when Quincy and I were first living together in Vancouver many years ago, I discovered that she'd somehow never read The Catcher in the Rye, and so I proceeded to read the whole book out loud to her as we lay in bed at night, with the rain failing softly outside.

And, naturally, I got to thinking about the very first time I read the book myself, on the banks of the Rio Paraguai in Brazil, when I was fourteen years old. It's pretty cool, of course, to have spent months living in the wilds of Brazil, and there was no internet then, that's for sure; so you'd think that the stuff I remember from that particular time would be unique to that particular place. Fishing for piranha. Leaning over the bow of a boat to lasso alligators at night. Eating a dinner my dad made from day-old capybara meat scavanged from a jaguar kill. That sort of thing. And I do remember those things. But I also remember, just as meaningfully, that I spent that summer lying in a lazy hammock reading and re-reading the same three books over and over again. One of those books was The Catcher in the Rye, and I read it the most of all. I must have read it about a hundred times that summer, if you want to know the truth. I'm not kidding.

It makes me wonder what exactly Jasper and Maddox will end up remembering most fondly from their half-year here in France. I'd like to think it'll be something uniquely Provençal. The local sacristains maybe, or stumbling upon vine-covered ruins in the middle of the forest, or our walks down the narrow alleyways of Cotignac, sidestepping dogshit while the church bells ring and the swallows and swifts dart in and out of the caves in the cliffs overhead. But I'm sure I'm wrong. They'll probably remember watching Speedy Gonzalez and Tom & Jerry over and over and over again on DVD.

So, really, much as I like to emphasize the exotic elements of life in France, life here is pretty mundane too. In fact, I'm tempted to make that point in a full-on Holden Caulfield kind of way. You know, something like: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where we're living, and what the food is like, and where to find all the famous fountains that tourists are always breaking their goddam necks to take pictures of, and all that Lonely Planet kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. That stuff always ends up sounding phony as hell. I'll just tell you instead about all this crumby stuff that happened the morning that Maddox woke up with the grippe, stumbling around like a madman, and coughing on my computer about a hundred times while I was trying to read the goddam Talk of the Town..."

But I won't. It sounds less like a loving homage to Salinger and more like a garish parody of myself trying to sound like Salinger. And, you know, given that I'm an Anglophone academic spending a sabbatical in the south of France, I'm already working the self-parody angle pretty hard.

I'll just say instead that, while reading The New Yorker online that morning, with pre-dawn light just beginning to illuminate the cliffs outside, I liked especially something that Adam Gopnik wrote, which reminded me in some weird way of something that John Cheever wrote many years ago when he heard the news that Hemingway was dead. Hemingway, who, like Salinger, I fetishized for a while; especially when I was a sophomore at Chapel Hill. It was in the spring of that year when I camped alone one night without a tent at the edge of a resevoir outside of town. The ground was uneven and at night it was cold but I didn't mind very much. In the morning the sun rose and it was warmer then. I sat in the sun and I ate many pieces of bread and cheddar cheese that I sliced with a pocket knife, and as I ate my bread and cheese I also narrated what I was doing in a manner that was as careful and exact as the way I wiped the blade of my knife clean on the tuft of grass beside the place where I sat. If a man was to have walked by and overheard me then he might have guessed that I was making a poor parody of Hemingway whose stories I had read many times and liked very much. And of course I was. Kinda like what I'm doing right now. See, I just can't resist the temptation.

Anyway, here's what Cheever had to say about Hemingway: "He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain. There was never, in my time, anyone to compare to him."

And here's what Gopnik said about Salinger: "no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his."