K.M. Soehnlein - Catcher in the Jersey Shore rye

San Francisco gay author K.M. Soehnlein 's third novel, Robin and Ruby, a sequel to his first, The World of Normal Boys, is coming out from Kensington Books in late March. But there are all sorts of eerie coincidences piling up about it right now.

The central relationship in Robin and Ruby was directly inspired by the late author J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, right down it its portrait-of-a-pair title. So was its narrative arc, at least in terms of the main characters. But in Soehnlein's book, the brother-and-sister combo consists of a gay dude and his sister. And in his version, the sis is much more inclined to speak and think for herself. Salinger had Franny letting Zooey do all the talking for both of them.

In his blog, Soehnlein gives some composition back-story. "As I wrote, I started to feel that there was something unsatisfactory in the way that Franny's collapse was a problem that had to be solved by Zooey; it was too much like the hysteria always befalling brilliant women in mid-20th-century fiction (think The Bell Jar or The Interior Castle). Did we need one more book about an unstable woman being saved by one of the men in her life?"

Also, in something of a coincidence, the novel is set on pretty much a single summer weekend at the now-fabled Jersey Shore. Way before the Jersey Shore series came out, when The Situation's abs still lay undiscovered, Soehnlein went to the same town that the TV show is set in, Seaside Heights, to complete research for his book. He's from Jersey originally, so he'd done his time as a teen at the Shore. His novel aims to capture some of that same youthful joie de vivre, but set in a time far, far away: the 1980s. We dunno, maybe when it comes to being young, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

"There are those weekends where everything changes," Soehnlein muses. "Where you meet someone new, where you might have really great sex for the first time, and you set off an adventure you can't believe you have the guts to undertake - they only happen a few times in your life - and sometimes no one knows that it's happening but you yourself. I wanted to write about that."

Salinger is of course very hot right now, and Soehnlein offers Franny & Zooey's final pages as a way into his own novel. "Salinger plays on the old aphorism, 'It ain't over til the Fat Lady sings,' by giving Zooey the words to convince Franny of her connection to the world: 'There isn't anyone out there who isn't the Fat Lady.'"

By the way, there's been a lot of speculation about the possibility of an unpublished Salinger opus waiting to be discovered, and we're here to tell you that yes, Virginia, there is a manuscript! In it, Holden Caulfield discovers where the ducks go in the winter: to Key West! He moves there, where he lives to a ripe old age, becoming a wizened piano-bar habitue. It's called Catcher in the Wry.