This story alone exhibits masterful storytelling, the curation of a subliminal sadness and suffering through characters you are suddenly confronted by, and know nothing of. Until you read Raise High The Roof-beams, Carpenters and realise you know so much about them, or more accurately, what his brother Buddy knows about them. He wrote this story imagining his brother's suicide, trying to cope with his grief by imagining the day might have happened. It is fascinating for a character that Buddy loves so much to not be portrayed particularly well at all. Is he trying to be honest about his brother, grappling with a writer's versus a brother's duty? Or is it the infinitely more complicated truth, that someone need not be good for you to love them? Stripped of the sentimentality of Roof Beams and the cynicism of The Catcher In The Rye, this story folds into Buddy's oeuvre as an intersection between a picture of post-war America, the fractured psyche of a country and a man, and the fear and confusion of grief.

"Well, they swim into a hole where there's a lot of bananas. They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I've known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas." He edged the float and its passenger a foot closer to the horizon. "Naturally, after that they're so fat they can't get out of the hole again. Can't fit through the door."