Well you can't argue that it was a perfect day for bananafish, whatever they are. This short story is worth reading because of how realistic the tone and dialogue is. When I read this, my mind was portraying screenplay to that of an early sitcom. The description of characters and their actions is very precise, but still leaves room to the imagination where it should, i.e. the specifics of their physical attributes.
The opening scene is beautiful. We are given all the information we'd need to understand the story and then some, but only through the conversation between a girl and a woman she calls "mother." The author doesn't change her title from "a girl" when narrating her even though we know for certain that she is Mrs. Muriel Glass who has only recently married Seymour Glass, a character who still isn't trusted by Mom and Dad. We feel this tension as a normal part of marriage, a comical device in any story, because of the way Muriel defends her love, by blowing off mom. I loved the conversation they had, it hasn't been sized down, because it's a real mother concerned about everything in her daughter's life. "The girl increased the angle between the receiver and her ear," it's a small gesture, but it happened.
The tone is more conversational than most because most of the story is in the conversations.
I think that the twist ending is constructed in the best way it could possibly be in literature. Right at the last sentence. James Gagne was a woman all along.
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