3000 Year Echo

Homer is alive and well in David Malouf's new novel Ransom. Told in dispassionate third person, the crux of the tale is the competing emotions of Achilles and Priam. Between them lays the body of dead Hector, killed when Achilles' rage boiled over, pushed to action after the death of his cousin Patroclus.
For his part, Priam is defeated at Troy, worried that his family will think ill of him, and aged in the face of conflict. Taking possession of his son's body drives the old King, hoping he can reclaim some small portion of what has been taken.
The two men come together in a choreography of grief that Malouf orchestrates with a deft touch, the language at once powerful and tender.
That Homer is alive some 3000 years after his death is a testament to the power of story. Any reader, or non reader, who cannot hear this echo, is likely deaf in other ways as well.

Resonance

What literate male of my age wasn't affected by J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye? The acerbic Holden Caufield, short on patience and long on insight, insinuated himself into the culture as a wit and a wonder. He couldn't abide rules, but he also couldn't abide phonies. Holden, his sister Phoebe, and his acquaintances from Pency Prep established Salinger as the conscience of rebellion from the 1950s on. Holden was a thinking man's malcontent, an intellectual rogue who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, as the world had turned to mush all around him.
Salinger, like his pint sized protagonist, turned away from the larger world as well, settling in tiny Cornish, New Hampshire. The story is well established, though the truth will never be out.
Salinger insulated his life with more than 50 years off the literary map. His passing is a mark that will go little marked after a brief run up of publicity about his most famous character. Salinger could have embraced the world, but in the end his legacy would have been determined the same way, as a result of his work. This is what resonates when the voice has fallen silent.