I picked up Franny and Zooey at the library yesterday, just in case I'm not reading enough books right now (the usual half dozen), and hadn't finished the first page when I found this gem:
[It was] the weekend of the Yale game. Of the twenty-some young men who were waiting at the station for their dates to arrive on the ten-fifty-two, no more than six or seven were out on the cold, open platform. The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, controversial turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.
I could do with fewer numbers here, but isn’t that last sentence wonderful? Doesn’t he just nail the know-it-all twenty-year-old we’ve all been?
Back with more soon…
