The Laughing Man by J.D. Salinger, 1949
The magic trick:
Intertwining a childhood memory with a serialized adventure story within the story
“The Laughing Man” puts us in childhood memoir territory. Our narrator remembers when he was 9 years old in 1928 (coincidentally the same age for Mr. Salinger) and he very much admired his youth group leader. The story intertwines memories of this young man with an internal running story of the “Laughing Man” character he creates through serialized stories he tells the kids on the bus. The natural interplay between the two stories encourages the reader to look for symbols and meanings. Not sure I found anything earth-shattering, but it’s a great format for a story.
(Very Wes Anderson, by the way.)
And that’s quite a trick on Salinger’s part.
The selection:
Properly infuriated, the Laughing Man pushed off his mask with his tongue and confronted the Dufarges with his naked face by moonlight. Mlle. Dufarge responded by passing out cold. Her father was luckier. By chance, he was having one of his coughing spells at the moment and thereby missed the lethal unveiling. When his coughing spell was over and he saw his daughter stretched out supine on the moonlit ground, Dufarge put two and two together. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he fired the full clip in his automatic toward the sound of the Laughing Man’s heavy, sibilant breathing.
The installment ended there.
The Chief took his dollar Ingersoll out of his watch pocked, looked at it, then swung around in his seat and started up the motor. I checked my own watch. It was almost four-thirty. As the bus moved forward, I asked the Chief if he wasn’t going to watch for Mary Hudson. He didn’t answer me, and before I could repeat my question, he tilted his head back and addressed all of us: “Let’s have a little quiet in this damn bus.” Whatever else it may have been, the order was basically unsensible. The bus had been, and was, very quiet. Almost everybody was thinking about the spot the Laughing Man had been left in. We were long past worrying about him – we had too much confidence in him for that – but we were never past accepting his most perilous moments quietly.
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