So long, and thanks for all the bananafish.

Whoa. First Auchincloss. Then Zinn. Now Salinger. It's been a bad week for aging, venerable east coast writers.

On preview:
msali, that was perfect.

totally. and totally.

Back when I was reading Salinger, I treked out to the largest library in the area to see if I could read his story "Hapworth 16, 1924" in an old copy of the New Yorker. They didn't have the original issue, but had it on microfilm. So I printed out the 40 or so pages of it (the readability of this microfilm absolutely sucked, btw). The stapled bundle of pages still resides somewhere on my bookshelves, along with the beat up paperbacks of his other works.

Count me among those who couldn't really identify with Holden or Salinger's voice generally. Don't hate him, just wasn't electrified.

Wow, I had no idea he was still alive.

Salinger's Franny and Zooey is one of those books that have had a really huge influence on me; at some point, I considered Franny a sort of a role model. The copy I have is an old paperback from 1971 (I think); I bought it at least fourth hand, because there's a note on the inside cover apologizing for giving someone a second-hand book because "it's nearly impossible to find Salinger on the first hand market right now" (how times change) and a third person must have bought it and then resold it to the bookstore later on where I bought it. And that's my Salinger story.

Never really liked Cathcer in the Rye, though.

My theory on liking Catcher in the Rye is that it depends on when you first read it, regardless of subsequent readings. If you read the book in your teens, you're likely to have identified with Holden to some extent; upon later readings, you still remember that identification, at least subconsciously, and will always be a fan. Me, I read it first at around 30 years old, and hated the whiny little special snowflake who talked a big game, but never really did anything.

I read Holden in my teens, and didn't really like him then, either! It's not a favorite book of mine, but I really liked "Nine Stories." And I respect what Salinger did for literature, particularly young adult literature, in terms of broadening topics, subjects, tones, and characters that one could expect a novel to deal with.

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

A few weeks ago my college-aged niece and I were at the park in the evening, as the dark came down and the lights went up and the snow stopped falling and everything was frozen and blanketed. My niece nudged me, nodded toward the pond, and asked "Ducks?" And we both smiled together, thinking of the question Holden Caulfield keeps asking. We've never talked about the book, we've never read it together, we each just knew instinctively that the other would understand the reference.

Thank you, J.D. Salinger, for that moment and for many other moments just like that.

I loved the short stories, but I came to Catcher in the Rye earliest, and my feelings for the book have evolved over the years. Speaking only for myself, mrmoonpie, I agree that as, a young reader, I identified with Holden much more than I would have as an adult, and I read his story with an uncritical, gullible openness that Salinger almost certainly never intended.

(But how could I not identify with him? I was a kid with far too many unpleasant, unflattering similarities to Holden: I was the privileged child of educated cosmopolitan parents suffering the silence that falls on some families in the wake of a child's death, I knew boarding school was on the horizon, I was bright but starting to be a mysteriously floundering fuck-up. I hadn't actually been expelled yet by the time I stumbled upon CitR, but it was coming.)

But my strong early identification with Holden didn't stifle my later ability to dissect the character, to see that he is a terribly unreliable narrator, to feel sorrow and irritation and affection and grief all at the same time for this kid, this screwed-up sorrowful brash dumb kid. The fact that he never really did anything is key to the character; he's paralyzed, he's aimless, he's powerless and heartbroken, and he's ultimately one of those goddamn phonies he complains about.

Oh, you know what, Elsa, I kind of misspoke earlier--my theory is about liking or disliking Holden, not really the book itself. You're right, I think, about Salinger's intent (as much as we can ever really guess an author's intent); I don't think we were ever supposed to like Holden in the first place. What's surprising to me is that so many folks do. Or maybe it's not surprising.

There were four posts in a row about this on Metafilter. The first three were deleted.

Buncha phonies!

I don't know that liking Holden or not liking Holden is a crucial question. (Believing him or not? Yes, crucial, and one that uncritical readers are likely to miss, and that I missed on first reading.) I still do have an affection for Holden, and you may be right that I wouldn't if I had met him during my adulthood.

But I'm not sure about that. I feel for Holden the way I feel for a couple of big-talking teenagers I know at the moment: they have their fine qualities, and they have thier faults, and it makes me crazy to see them wasting their talents on crappy snark and self-aggrandizing nonsense, but I get it. And I believe that they'll grow up to be better --- to be more active, more interesting, more tolerant, more happy --- assuming they grow up at all.

mrmoonpie, just to be clear: I don't have a stake in this discussion, and I'm not sure there's a definitive right or wrong here. But I sure am enjoying it!

Buncha phonies!

My high-school roommate M. and I used to occasionally sum up a bad day with the preppies as "The goddam phonies are coming in the goddam windows!"

My cats are named Franny and Zooey. But I didn't name them.

I despised Catcher when I read it in high school but maybe I wouldn't take it so personally now. In retrospect, the fact that I had spent most of my life being picked on by self-absorbed rich kids probably colored my reaction to Holder. At the time, the last thing that I wanted to read about was how difficult life was for a prep school kid. Now that I'm many years past my working-class kid fury, I could read it a little more dispassionately.