J.D. Salinger. A Perfect Day for Bananafish:

“There were ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women’s pocket-sized magazine, called “Sex Is Fun-or Hell.” She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty. “

J.D. Salinger is best known as the author of The Catcher in the Rye, but he was also an accomplished short story writer who contributed many stories, including this one, to The New Yorker magazine. Unfortunately this comes as news to most people who were forced to read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and never ventured into the school library to find out more about the author and found Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger.

What I love about this passage, the opening two paragraphs of Bananafish, is the way that Salinger uses details to really create a scene. For example the number of ad men present isn’t necessarily relevant to the story, but by mentioning that there are ninety-seven the reader is forced to imagine ninety-seven men in suits milling about the hotel. Salinger also pointes out that the girl, who’s name isn’t immediately known to the reader, is staying in room 507 a detail that makes the hotel a large one in our minds with at least five floors or more than five hundred rooms. As the scene develops we learn that the girl is waiting for a long-distance phone call, which piques the readers interest to continue reading the story to find out who this girl is willing to wait over two hours to talk to. Salinger then explains how the girl used the time and proceeds to give an account of her activity. He begins every sentence in the sequence with the pronoun “she” giving the list a monotonous feel to it. I personally love the second paragraph because Salinger is able to give a very descriptive description of the girl using an irregular method. It is likely that the reader has never thought of somebody as somebody who looks as if her phone had been ringing continually since puberty, but knows exactly what that means when read. I admire that in any art form, the ability to convey meaning in unconventional ways and J.D. Salinger is a master at it. Read the complete story, you won’t be disappointed.