Essay by Thomas Shess exclusive to PillartoPost.org, a daily online magazine.
“In comparing two collections of nine stories each—Alice Munro’s and J.D. Salinger’s—the experience feels remarkably like a thoughtful wine pairing. The grapes, so to speak, are drawn from the everyday: ordinary characters, quiet plots. But in the hands of these literary vintners, the result is anything but common. What begins as a comparison becomes a revelation. You’re no longer just sampling two authors—you’re tasting the creation of an entirely new vintage, unexpected in its depth, memorable in its aftertaste.”
Literary comparisons are often either too obvious or too abstract to matter. But once in a while, two bodies of work—separated by time, temperament, and geography—invite close reading, not because of their similarities, but because of the subtle light they cast on each other.
So it is with J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) and Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001).
Both contain nine stories. Both center ordinary characters and quiet plots. Both are now considered landmark works in short fiction. But their purposes, their tones, and their gravitational pull could not be more distinct. This comparative reading proposes not a ranking, but a kind of literary tasting—like a pairing of two fine vintages.
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| Salinger: 1919-2010 The comet, arrives with brilliance and fragility. |
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| Munro: 1931-2024 The sun, illuminates long-forgotten corridors of daily life. |
THREE PAIRINGS...
The following are three pairings that reveal how each author approaches themes of loss, connection, and the architecture of memory.
1. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” vs. “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” Salinger’s story opens on a beach in Florida. Seymour Glass, recently returned from war, speaks with a precocious girl about bananafish—creatures that gorge themselves until they die. He then retreats to his hotel room and, in a few devastating lines, ends his life. Munro’s title story follows Johanna, a housekeeper who receives forged love letters as part of a schoolgirl prank. Moved by their tenderness, she sets off to marry the letter’s supposed author. The prank becomes prophecy. The imagined romance turns real. Where Salinger dwells in psychic collapse, Munro delivers emotional reinvention. Both explore what happens when people act on false premises: Seymour misreads the world, and can’t survive it; Johanna misreads a love letter, and builds a life.
2. “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” vs. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” In Salinger’s story, a soldier meets a girl named Esmé in an English tearoom. She is curious, sensitive, and odd. Her presence, and later her letter, provide solace during his mental unraveling after D-Day. The letter is never read aloud. We feel its power only through his emotional return.
In Munro’s piece, a professor commits his wife to memory care. As she forgets their shared life, she forms an attachment to another man. The husband, once unfaithful himself, begins visiting regularly—not out of guilt, but love.
Both stories are about the restoration of self—one through a child’s compassion, the other through an old man’s surrender. The emotional energy in each is restrained, yet unshakably humane.
3. “Teddy” vs. “Nettles” Teddy is a ten-year-old mystic on a cruise ship. He speaks of death, reincarnation, and detachment with unnerving calm. Salinger leaves him on the brink of tragedy—maybe an accident, maybe fate, maybe enlightenment.
In “Nettles,” a woman revisits a brief affair from her youth. The man appears, disappears, reappears—never quite attainable, never fully hers. The memory lingers, unresolved, poignant in its ordinariness.
Both stories revolve around ambiguous endings. Teddy might die. The narrator of “Nettles” might never understand what that summer meant. They echo with what’s unsaid, trusting the reader to feel what the characters cannot express.
In Closing
Salinger wrote like someone fleeing a fire with a box of letters under his arm. His stories dazzle in fragments, radiant with youth, trauma, and yearning.
Munro, by contrast, wrote with the stillness of long light across a kitchen floor. Her stories age with the reader.
To compare these two authors is not to say one is greater. It is to place two distinct musical instruments beside each other and notice how they harmonize despite their differences.
Salinger teaches us how loud silence can be. Munro shows us the contours of lives that never quite go right, but never fully fall apart.
Literary & Wine Pairings
In both cases, the mundane is a stage for the sacred. That they do it in such different keys is not a contradiction, but a kind of gift.
In comparing two collections of nine stories apiece between Alice Munro and J.D. Salinger the experience of that is very much like a wine pairing..
Certainly, the experience would be akin to taking common grapes and discern meaning from the winemakers (authors) and come away realizing you've experience the creation of a whole new vintage.
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