Chris Wilson in Slate:
I love J.D. Salinger, who died today, far too much to write about him with any perspective. Perhaps this qualifies me to eulogize his last anthologized work—the story of a man who loves and admires his deceased brother too much to write about him with any perspective.
“Seymour: An Introduction” was originally published in The New Yorker in 1959 and was printed in book form, alongside “Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters,” four years later. It runs about 120 pages and has no appreciable form, reading like an unedited, freewheeling character description. I know several avowed Salinger fanatics who have never made it through the thing, and I don't blame them: The story is dense, tiresome, and irritating. Its charm is difficult to diagnose. But I submit that it's the best story the guy ever wrote.
Narrated by Buddy Glass—the second eldest brother of the prodigious family that occupies the majority of Salinger's post-Catcher fiction—it takes place years after Seymour Glass committed suicide. There is very little plot. Buddy, like Salinger, has retreated to a bucolic existence in New England, where he is preparing a volume of his dead brother's poetry for publication. The story is a jumble of anecdotes, musings, and epic descriptions, punctuated by Buddy's still-raw anger and confusion over his brother's suicide.
More here.