Street Games in J. D. Salinger and Gerald Green
One of the main issues, it seems to me, in defining what it is to be American is the issue of conformity vs. nonconformity. This issue is especially problematic for those people who by definition are "different": racial or religious minorities, immigrantsÂ—people who are forced to confront the question of how much of their previous culture they can preserve, hang on to, and how much of it they have to give up in order to "melt" into the American pot. Although in its idealistic moments America celebrates uniqueness, idiosyncrasy, individualism, and nonconformity, in its more practical, realistic, and mundaneÂ—and much more frequentÂ— moments, it produces unrelenting pressure to conform. A look at the treatment of street games by two contemporary novelists, J. D. Salinger and Gerald Green, shows two diametrically opposed responses to this pressure. (I call Salinger "contemporary" even though he's been literarily "dead" for twenty years because he's still alive and, reports have it, still writing; he's just not publishing.) Both novelists use street games as an important device in establishing a central character's sense of self in relation to society: in the case of Salinger's Seymour Glass in Seymour: An Introduction, the ultimate individualist; in the case of Albert Abrams in Green's To Brooklyn with Love,