“At least you know there won’t be any goddam ulterior motives in this madhouse,” Zooey tells Franny. “Whatever we are, we’re not fishy, buddy.” “Close on the heels of kindness, originality is one of the most thrilling things in the world, also the most rare!” Seymour writes in “Hapworth.” What is thrilling about that sentence is, of course, the order in which kindness and originality are put. And what makes reading Salinger such a consistently bracing experience is our sense of always being in the presence of something that—whatever it is—isn’t fishy.
via Justice to J.D. Salinger – The New York Review of Books.