How did narcissism take hold in America like a social disease? A lot of people out there are trying to find the source. Certainly there was more than a hint in a nice essay on children in the American novel from the late '40's on in "Descended from Salinger" by Polly Morrice on J. D. Salinger, his readers and his descendants in a recent New York Times Book Review.
...Not everyone found Salinger’s children adorable. By the 1960s, critics were berating them for the very qualities that had appealed to an increasingly child-centered nation: their untouchable goodness, their self-absorption (Mary McCarthy labeled the Glass family a “terrifying narcissus pool”) and, perhaps inevitably, their popularity. Salinger himself was accused of being an overly indulgent literary parent: reviewing “Franny and Zooey” in the Book Review in 1961, John Updike noted that “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them.” Even Time magazine, in a 1963 review of “Raise High the Roof Beam,” offered an artless parody of Salinger’s stylized, first-person narrators: “It is very, very, very true that a large segment of the U.S. young is hung on old Buddy and his six weird brothers and sisters.”
Salinger’s quirky children certainly helped pave the way for less subtly drawn youngsters whose specialty was leading adults around by the nose. (Exhibit A: Hayley Mills, tricking her divorced parents into reconciling in the original 1961 version of “The Parent Trap.”) Yet the brickbats aimed at the Glass brood’s supposed narcissism did not prevent this trait from spreading among Salinger’s collegiate admirers. Like its literary favorites, the generation taking shape in the ’60s was endlessly self-referential, convinced that its shared experiences — from the Kennedy assassination to “Rocky and Bullwinkle” — mattered deeply. In fact, the “U.S. young” resembled an extended Glass family.
What's been happening to that generation's children and -- by now -- grandchildren?
These days, kids resemble not so much the Glasses as small Sammy Glicks, running ever earlier and harder, and attention has shifted from the narcissism of the young to the self-absorption of parents. The childhood now in vogue — in which kids’ feats are broadcast on decals on the family S.U.V., their achievements validating their parents’ lives — barely resembles the sphere of uncomplicated, mostly unsupervised pleasures, like stoopball and curb marbles, that Buddy Glass celebrates in “Seymour: An Introduction.” “It’s a Wise Child,” the decorous quiz program that made the Glass siblings household names, has morphed into “Kid Nation,” the reality show in which youngsters marooned in the New Mexican desert vie strenuously for real gold stars.
