The Nine Stories - and the themes of Salinger's fiction

Took along J.D. Salinger's influential and modestly titled Nine Stories to the beach yesterday and read the first four - isn't it funny that his collection title is so self-effacing and almost each of the stories as an extremely quirky title that gives little or even mis- information about the story itself? - this obliquity was something that Salinger pioneered and is now the norm in much fiction and certainly in all rock and hip-hop music. The stories stand up well even today, but I would say they're mostly significant for the light they cast forward on Salinger's brief and strange career. A Perfect Day for Bannafish, the first in the collection, is in fact the seminal story for just about the entire corpus of Salinger's work: first, the story is about the suicide, almost inexplicable, and extremely cruel - in hotel room right next to his sleeping wife he blows his brains out - of Seymour Glass; the rest of S's fiction tries to explain how and why this happened and to analyze the long shadow the suicide had on the Glass family. What we know about Seymour: intelligent in a showy and eccentric way (gives wife a volume of poems in German, Rilke probably, and tells her to learn German to read them), artistic (plays the piano in the hotel public space, for fun or to express or to show off who knows?), just finished with war service that maybe was traumatic but this is not explained, and - most important, the 2nd aspect that foretells much of S's fiction, he has a thing for little girls. Is this a repressed sexual desire whose force torments him and leads him to death? His behavior with the young girl on the beach, teasing her and even lightly touching her, would be appalling by today's standards but seems not to have drawn a lot of attention in the Salinger/Glass world - which we also see in this story, lots of drinking, long meandering conversations between parents and children. Second story in the collection, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, more about about very heavy drinking and elliptical conversation between two rich and spoiled 20ish women - the child gets largely ignored, until the mom finds a few moments to look at her in bed and thinks "poor Uncle Wiggily" - sorrow and pity for the child whom she cannot help or reach or perhaps even tolerate. On the one hand, in Salinger's fiction children are innocent and the objects of desire; on the other hand, children are nonentities unless he can portray them as miniature adults, precocious and kind of bratty (we see this in the 3rd story, Just Before the War Against the Eskimos). The 4th story, the first in the first person, is about a young man's first observations - watching his camp counselor, essentially - of love and heartbreak. Story will remind many readers of Roth's great, apparently final novel, Nemesis, about a leader of young boys struggling with his relationship with a beautiful young woman and with his obligations to the boys under his charge.