The year is 1996, and work of this kind difficult to find. Rakoff finds her new boss strange and demanding, but works hard to please her.
The agency and her boss are so revered they command the sort of respect that doesn't question the methods they employ for communicating with their clients. The new recruit must persevere with outdated office equipment and similar surroundings: dim book-lined hallways and offices, soft carpeting and lighting, dark, heavy leather and wooden furniture.
A visiting friend describes it as being like a funeral parlour, but Rakoff warms to the comforting hushed glow of her workplace. Taken for granted are the smells and smoking of cigarettes, which punctuate every action.
My Salinger Year could almost be retitled ''My Year of Discovery''. Discovery of the courage it sometimes takes to survive on your own that first year out of university, especially in a huge impersonal city like New York.
Rakoff calls at her friend Celeste's apartment and finds her sitting up in bed watching television reruns ''and stroking a strange cat, tears running down her face''. Celeste confesses to cooking and eating rather a lot of spaghetti, but ''I knew this wasn't what was bothering her ... what terrified her was the set of circumstances that allowed her to eat this amount ... the unmoored, untethered quality of her life, in which no-one - no mother, sister, room-mate, professor, boyfriend, anyone - was there to monitor her habits and behaviours ... she woke up, went to work, came home, alone.''
Rakoff's antidote to loneliness was to hook up with Dan; an aspiring writer whose prose is as unfathomable as his actions. She's dropped her previous compatible college boyfriend to live with Dan in a tiny unheated apartment, his controlling behaviour towards her dominating her leisure. He's older than her and makes most of the decisions affecting their life together until she gains an insight into their unequal relationship at the year's end.
Lured by the promise of finding out more about a legendary and reclusive writer, at the book's end I knew only a little more about him than when I started. Salinger does appear, but in brief spurts of time as he contacts his agent, who happens to be Rakoff's boss.
Hugely protective of him, no other staff members are permitted contact. There is a standard reply to all fan mail which arrives, but some of the letters Rakoff finds so intriguing she takes it upon herself to answer in person. Eventually, she does get to meet him, but these occasions are minor parts of the book, which is essentially a candid and convincing account of a year of maturing on all sorts of levels.
Because she includes such a lot of daily minutiae, you feel as though you're walking through the experience with her and I let her guide me through this part of her life, enjoying her honesty and the chance to find out at first hand what it was like working in publishing when it was at its zenith.
- Patricia Thwaites is a retired Dunedin schoolteacher.
