If you’ve never gotten over your relationship with Holden Caulfield, say, and can’t for the life of you remember the name of whoever it was that shared your first real kiss, you’ve had the experience that Anne Roiphe writes about. She is ever and always infatuated not just with Holden, the heroic anti-phony and prophet of Sixties rejectionism; she’s in love with Hemingway’s wise and doomed alter ego in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan, an American of conscience in the Spanish Civil War. She’s in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver, still more with John Updike’s horny, hapless Rabbit, Harry Angstrom, “sweetheart of mine,” Anne Roiphe writes, “despite it all.”
Think about your own literary crushes: it could be Harry Potter, Jane Eyre, Nick Carraway, Bridget Jones, Lancelot, Isabel Archer, King Henry the Fifth, Daisy Buchanan. Falling in love with just a book in your hands is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Anne Roiphe, author of “For Rabbit with Love and Squalor”