Okay, I remember a few little things about The Catcher in the
Rye from my adolescence many years ago — who doesn’t? —
but what I recall most is getting bogged down in a very boring
story about halfway through.
I lived in New York and could not escape the cultish
atmosphere that kept literary superstars in ink. With each new
droplet of prose from J.D. (Jerry) Salinger, readers of The
New Yorker held their breath. A book became a major news
story.
Plowing through other people’s prose has always been one of
my strengths but I stumbled again on about page 25 of Franny
and Zooey, and even sooner in “Raise High the Roofbeams,
Carpenters.”
And in 1965, when his short story “Hapworth 16,
1924” appeared in The New Yorker, the critical eyebrows
of Gotham were raised in collective consternation. Wrote Janet
Malcolm in a famous New York Review of Books essay, “It
seemed to confirm the growing critical consensus that Salinger
was going to hell in a handbasket.”
Franny and Zooey
(F&Z) brought barbs from
Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, and John
Updike.
Although Malcolm’s essay came down in defense of
Salinger, she conveyed the F&Z reception in spades: “I don’t
know of any other case where literary characters have aroused
such animosity, and where a writer of fiction has been so
severely censured for failing to understand the offensiveness of
his creations,” she wrote.
I was relieved that nothing further came from the New
Hampshire recluse but occasional reports of bizarre behavior.
It saved me from striving vainly to keep up with
trendier friends.
Joyce Maynard, one of the few outsiders to be invited
in, wrote a book about her trials with the New Hampshire hermit,
At Home in the World. After living with Salinger for
less than a year, she was abruptly told to get out. She was 18,
he was 53. She wrote that she has spent the rest of her life
wondering what she did wrong.
So when Jerry died recently at 91, I was astonished to see
he could still do it — he provoked a torrent of praise and grief
from otherwise careful critics and writers.
Fortunately I now live in France and could escape the
immediate fuss. Distance brings focus.
Looking again at Salinger’s only novel worthy of the name,
I feel vindicated. Catcher reads like a period piece
from the 1950s, and, if it still sells to grownups, it appeals to
their inner 15-year-old. That ranks it one step above a pretty
good children’s book.
A well-read friend put it this way: “If it were published
today it wouldn’t make a ripple.”
Catcher protagonist Holden
Caulfield’s experiences, wrote one critic, dramatize the
“despoliation of childhood innocence and integrity by
insensitive, superficial adults.” This strikes a chord with most
adolescents and has ensured a long life for the book on high
school reading lists. A literary reputation, however, that rests
largely on a single title, raises questions.
Lacking any proof that he locked his brilliant later novels
in a safe somewhere, he simply does not compare with the varied
and prolific output of writers such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow,
John Updike, Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates.
The outpouring at his death seems to come from a
combination of nostalgia for the 1950s, combined with an intense
desire to conform to literary convention and compassion for a man
apparently suffering from a monumental writer’s block.
A shame, really, for maybe he would have
improved.
