My Mysterious Search for J.D. Salinger: An obsessive (if strange) pilgrimage to the late author’s New Hampshire sanctuary, where, if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of one man hiding. (Ron Rosenbaum, Jan 28, 2010, Esquire)
There’s a line in Mao II, Don DeLillo’s novel about a Salinger-like reclusive writer who wonders: Why are so many so obsessed with my invisibility, my hiddenness, my absence?
“When a writer doesn’t show his face,” he answers himself, “he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.”
The silence of a writer is not the same as the silence of God, but there’s something analogous: an awe-inspiring creator, someone we believe has some answers of some kind, refusing to respond to us, hiding his face, withholding his creation. The problem, the rare phenomenon of the unavailable, invisible, indifferent writer (indifferent to our questions, indifferent to the publicity-industrial complex so many serve), is the literary equivalent of the problem of theodicy, the specialized subdiscipline of theology that addresses the problem of the apparent silent indifference of God to the hell of human suffering.
And when a writer won’t break his silence, we think of ways to break into it. We think of knocking on his door or leaving messages in his mailbox.
S.’s two mailboxes beckoned to me as I stood at the bottom of his driveway.