{"id":695302,"date":"2026-07-16T18:48:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T18:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/695302\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T18:48:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T18:48:10","slug":"i-felt-holden-was-talking-to-me-alone-the-catcher-in-the-rye-at-75-jd-salinger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/695302\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I felt Holden was talking to me alone\u2019: The Catcher in the Rye at 75 | JD Salinger"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1981, when I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a paperback of her dad\u2019s favourite novel. I\u2019d\u00a0never heard of it despite living in a home full of books. My parents loved the work of\u00a0Edna O\u2019Brien, Muriel Spark, John\u00a0le\u00a0Carr\u00e9, Dickens. So did I. But encountering the first sentence of JD\u00a0Salinger\u2019s The Catcher in the Rye made the world burst into colour.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you really want to hear about it, the first thing you\u2019ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don\u2019t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation markReading Salinger had the same effect on me as hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time<\/p>\n

It had never occurred to me that writing could make your blood fizz with delight. I don\u2019t exaggerate when I say Salinger had the same effect on me as hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time. This was Pretty Vacant in prose. And though it was published 75 years ago this month, it\u2019s still as captivating, bold and transgressive as ever.<\/p>\n

The action takes place over three days and nights in December 1949. Our\u00a0narrator, Holden Caulfield, is 17, chronicling events that befell him a year ago, when he was expelled from his boarding school, Pencey Prep, where the only thing he learned is that \u201cAll morons hate it when you call them a moron.\u201d A restless, unknowingly witty Irish-American kid, he has a wry watchfulness that counterpoints his naivety. Flitting from Pencey a few days early, he bunks off to Manhattan, where his parents and sister live. The plan is to put up in a flophouse and assemble his excuses. A born fantasist, he can\u2019t resist dissembling to anyone he meets along the way, but his gaucheness keeps tripping him up. \u201cI\u2019m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It\u2019s awful. If I\u2019m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I\u2019m going, I\u2019m liable to say I\u2019m going to the\u00a0opera. It\u2019s terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Catcher in the Rye has almost no plot. In fact, it seems suspicious of\u00a0narrative, literature and all forms of\u00a0storytelling. Conventional biography is mistrusted, the movies are \u201cphoney\u201d, Shakespeare\u2019s plays make no sense. The hero\u2019s brother, DB, a screenwriter, has sold out his talent and is likened to a prostitute. The novel brilliantly mistrusts itself by challenging its own purpose.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s most remarkable about the\u00a0book is how it alters its meanings depending on the reader\u2019s age. Only\u00a0the greatest novels manage this alchemy. The Catcher is in the same league as Ulysses or The Handmaid\u2019s Tale in having built into its texture a perpetual self-regeneration. I return to it every few years, the closest thing in my life to a pilgrimage. Whenever I do, I\u2019m reading a different novel, as vivid, strange, edgy and unnerving as the one that switched on my lights 45 years ago.<\/p>\n

Holden\u2019s wanderings around Manhattan, trying on adulthood, inviting strangers to \u201chave a cocktail\u201d with him, seem riotously funny to a young reader. \u201cLife is a game, boy,\u201d one grownup tells him. \u201cGame, my ass,\u201d Holden retorts. His antics call to mind Graham Greene\u2019s verdict on Flann O\u2019Brien\u2019s At Swim-Two-Birds, a book that brings \u201cthe kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage\u201d. Here\u2019s a kid who has no rules or boundaries, drifting around the Big Apple in a haze of splendid haplessness that is never less than weirdly heroic. Rubbishing everything he sees, oscillating between superiority and dread, he keeps up a commentary so beautifully sardonic that you find yourself cheering it on. \u201cAnd I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I\u2019d probably lean over and\u00a0tell myself to please shut up.\u201d<\/p>\n

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But an older reader sees Holden\u2019s isolation. Behind the teenage mouthiness is a roiling mass of neurosis. Jealous, insecure, frightened, frustrated, Holden has suffered terrible losses, including the death from leukaemia of his brother, Allie, and is writing his chronicle in a psychiatric hospital. He feels himself \u201cdisappear\u201d, finds it hard to think. \u201cI\u00a0can\u2019t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I\u2019m not sure I\u2019d feel like it.\u201d It\u2019s possible he has been molested by a schoolteacher, although the incident is recalled with such ambivalence that we\u2019re never quite sure what happened. Holden\u2019s only tender feelings are towards women or children. The men in the book are schlubs or bores, but Holden\u2019s frequent attempts to forgive them lead to memorable moments of faint praise. \u201cI don\u2019t know about bores. Maybe you shouldn\u2019t feel too sorry if\u00a0you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don\u2019t hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they\u2019re secretly all terrific whistlers or\u00a0something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like many teenage readers, I felt Holden was talking to me \u2013 perhaps to\u00a0me alone \u2013 and that my responses to\u00a0what he was saying were somehow part of the novel. I even felt he was listening. This was something new and wonderful: fiction as friendship. \u201cWhat really knocks me out is a book that, when you\u2019re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn\u2019t happen much, though.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Catcher in the Rye is from a\u00a0different world, an era when teenagers didn\u2019t have too many rights.\u00a0But somehow, it\u2019s still around, so profoundly a part of the literary landscape that it can go unnoticed in\u00a0the haze. I owe it, because it\u2019s the novel that changed my life. By the time I finished reading Holden\u2019s story, I wanted to be a writer myself.<\/p>\n

Joseph O\u2019Connor\u2019s novel The Ghosts of Rome<\/a> is published by Harvill Secker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1981, when I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a paperback of her dad\u2019s favourite novel.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":695303,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-695302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}