THE CATCHER IN THE RYE —J. D. Salinger—Little, Brown .”Some of my best friends are children,” says Jerome David Salinger, 32.
“In fact, all of my best friends are children.” And Salinger has
written short stories about his best friends with love, brilliance and
20-20 vision. In his tough-tender first novel, The Catcher in the Rye
, he charts the miseries and
ecstasies of an adolescent rebel, and deals out some of the most acidly
humorous deadpan satire since the late great Ring Lardner.Some Cheap Hotel. A lanky, crew-cut 16, well-born Holden Caulfield is
sure all the world is out of step but him. His code is the survival of
the flippest, and he talks a lingo as forthright and gamy, in its way,
as a soldier's. Flunking four subjects out of five, he has just been
fired from his fourth school.Afraid to go home ahead of his bad news, he checks in at a cheap New
York hotel; in the next 48 hours, he tries on a man-about-town role
several sizes too large for him. Getting sickly drunk at a bar, he
slithers away in a Walter Mitty mood, pretending: “Rocky's mob got me
… I kept putting my hand under my jacket, on my stomach and all, to
keep the blood from dripping all over the place. I didn't want anybody
to know I was even wounded . . . Boy, was I drunk.”Some Crazy Cliff. When the seedy night elevator man proposes sending a
young prostitute to his room, bravado makes him play along. Besides: “I
worry about that stuff sometimes. I read this book once . . . that had
this very sophisticated, suave, sexy guy in it . . . and all he did in
his spare time was beat women off with a club … He said, in this one
part, that a woman's body is like a violin and all, and that it takes a
terrific musician to play it right. It was a very corny book—I realize
that—but I couldn't get that violin stuff out of my mind anyway.” His
enthusiasm for that kind of fiddling practice fades in hopeless
embarrassment as soon as the tart snakes out of her dress.Scolded by testy cab drivers, seared by his best girl's refusal to elope
with him, and surrounded by an adult world of “phonies,” he loses
control of his tight-lipped histrionics. He sneaks home for a midnight
chat with his perky ten-year-old sister, breaks down and cries on her
bed. In a moving moment, he tells her what he would really like to do
and be: “I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in
this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's
around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I'm standing on the edge of
some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they
start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't
look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch
them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and
all. I know it's crazy . . .”For U.S. readers, the prize catch in The Catcher in the Rye may well be
Novelist Salinger himself. He can understand an adolescent mind without
displaying one.
