Nine Stories

Multiple readers call Nine Stories uneven, naming 'Teddy,' 'Down at the Dinghy,' and 'Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes' as the entries that suffer for sitting next to the two famous ones, one flatly saying they “suffer from being collected in the same book as the others.” The children beyond Esme are a real entry barrier; a second reviewer says they “found these the hardest to warm to.” A critic goes further on Pretty Mouth, calling it “by far the worst, most vulgar, most pointless” story in the book. Readers who never finished Catcher in the Rye say that resistance to Salinger's narrating voice carries over here, and Bananafish's famous ambiguity cuts the other way for some, one saying flatly, “I don't understand it at all.”