IIn 1981, when I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a paperback of her father’s favorite novel. I had never heard of it, despite living in a house full of books. My parents liked the work of Edna O’Brien, Muriel Spark, John le Carré, Dickens. I also did the same. But the world became colorful after seeing the first sentence of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’d probably want to know is where I was born, and what my shitty childhood was like, and how my parents were busy before I had me and all that David Copperfield kind of bullshit, but I don’t feel like going into that if you want to know the truth.”
I never imagined that writing would fill your blood with joy. I don’t exaggerate when I say that Salinger had the same effect on me as hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time. It was very blank in prose. And although it was published 75 years ago this month, it’s still as captivating, bold and offensive as ever.
The action takes place over three days and nights in December 1949. Our narrator, Holden Caulfield, is 17 years old, describing the events that happened to him a year earlier, when he was kicked out of his boarding school, Pencey Prep, where the only thing he learned is that “all fools hate it when you call them stupid.” A restless, preternaturally intelligent Irish-American child, he has a vigilant watchfulness that counterbalances his naivety. Having escaped from Pencey a few days earlier, he moves to Manhattan, where his parents and sister live. The plan is to set up in a flophouse and collect his excuses. A born fantasist, he can’t help but disagree with anyone he meets along the way, but his arrogance keeps coming back to haunt him. “I’m the most terrible liar I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s terrible. If I’m going to the shop to buy a magazine, and someone asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.”
The Catcher in the Rye has almost no plot. In fact, it appears to be suspicious of all forms of fiction, literature, and storytelling. Traditional biographies are distrusted, films are “fake”, Shakespeare’s plays make no sense. The protagonist’s brother, DB, a screenwriter, has sold his talent and is compared to a prostitute. The novel brilliantly disbelieves itself by challenging its own purpose.
The most remarkable thing about the book is how it changes its meaning depending on the age of the reader. Only the greatest novels manage this alchemy. The Catcher is in the same league as Ulysses or The Handmaid’s Tale, which have built a perpetual self-regeneration into its structure. I return there every few years, it’s the closest I’ve come to a pilgrimage in my life. Every time I do so, I’m reading a different novel, equally as lively, strange, edgy and disturbing as the one that turned my light on 45 years ago.
Holden’s wandering around Manhattan, trying to act like adulthood, inviting strangers to have “cocktails” with him, sounds extremely ridiculous to a young reader. “Life’s a game, boy,” an adult tells him. “Game, my ass,” Holden replies. His actions are reminiscent of Graham Greene’s judgment on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, A book that evokes “the kind of joy you feel when people smash china on stage”. Here’s a kid with no rules or boundaries, wandering around the Big Apple in a fog of glorious helplessness that’s strangely nothing short of heroic. Battling everything he sees, swinging between superiority and fear, he keeps making sarcastic remarks so beautifully that you find yourself admiring him. “And I have one of those really loud, silly laughs. I mean if I was ever sitting behind me in a movie or something, I would probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.”
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But an older reader sees Holden’s isolation. Behind the adolescent mouth is a swelling mass of neuroses. Jealous, insecure, fearful, depressed, Holden has suffered terrible losses, including the death of his brother, Eli, from leukemia, and is writing his own history in a psychiatric hospital. He feels himself “missing”, it becomes difficult for him to think. “I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel the same way.” It is possible that she was molested by a schoolteacher, although the incident is so vaguely remembered that we are never sure what happened. Holden’s only tender feelings are towards women or children. The men in the book are scholars or bores, but Holden’s frequent attempts to forgive them lead to memorable moments of faint praise. “I don’t know about sacks. Maybe you shouldn’t feel too sorry if you see some pretty girl marrying them. They don’t hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they all secretly make terrible whistling noises or something.”
Like many teenage readers, I felt that Holden was talking to me – perhaps to me alone – and that my reactions to what he was saying were somehow part of the novel. I also felt that he was listening. It was something new and wonderful: imagination as friendship. “What really bugs me is a book that, once you’ve read it, makes you wish that the author who wrote it was your best friend and you could call him whenever you felt like it. However, that doesn’t happen a lot.”
The Catcher in the Rye is from a different world, an era when teenagers didn’t have many rights. But somehow, it’s still around, so deeply a part of the literary landscape that it can go unnoticed in the fog. I am indebted to it, because it is the novel that changed my life. By the time I read Holden’s story, I wanted to be a writer myself.
Joseph O’Connor’s novel ghosts of rome is published by Harville Secker.
