The whole Glass family saga is creepy and off-putting. It’s supposed to be, I guess, but what I mean is that the hyper-intellectualized way in which they respond to their world is supposed to also be endearing, but I don’t find it endearing, just kind of sad. Like, the end of the book, where the little old man is gone, and Buddy thinks maybe he should send the cigar end to Seymour—“ Possibly with a blank sheet of paper enclosed, by way of explanation”—rings false to me. The cigar end, yes, but not the blank sheet of paper.

But what I love about this book is its picture of the way we relate to the social groups we find ourselves in, and the two groups it chooses to juxtapose: Buddy's family, and the totally random group of strangers he finds himself in the car with. So, there's this wonderful passage where the book asks why Buddy stays in the car that's taking him to the house of the bride his brother just abandoned:

"Why, then, did I go on sitting in the car? Why didn’t I get out while, say, we were stopped for a red light? And, still more salient, why had I jumped in the car in the first place? . . . There seem to me at least a dozen answers to these questions, and all of them, however dimly, valid, enough. I think, though, that I can dispense with them, and just reiterate that the year was 1942, that I was twenty-three, newly drafted, newly advised in the efficacy of keeping close to the herd—and, above all, I felt lonely. One simply jumped into loaded cars, as I see it, and stayed seated in them."

I feel like this describes a lot of moments in my life.

As for why Seymour can't participate in the marriage ceremony and whether it relates to his eventual suicide, I wasn't very interested in the mystery, except that it makes a nice background to the wonderful mystery of why Buddy gets in the car, why anybody is part of the little groups we're part of, why the little old man writes "Delighted!" and seems so thoroughly to mean it when invited to join an awful group of people on a nonsensical outing on a totally unpleasant day.