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Scourge of Phonies

The teenage perspective of J. D. Salinger, 1919-2010.

Feb 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 21 • By BARTON SWAIM
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Driving home from work one night last week, I heard somebody on the radio talking about The Catcher in the Rye. I guessed—correctly as it turned out—that the author had died. What I couldn’t remember, momentarily, was whether his name was J. D. Salinger or Holden Caulfield. 

Like millions of other adolescents, I was obliged to read Salinger’s famous novel at precisely the age it might have done the most harm: 16. Fortunately, I hated it. I didn’t know why I hated it, exactly. Partly it had to do with the sort of boys (it was only boys) who liked it. One or two of them, as I remember, had some high-minded critical reasons to argue for its greatness. Of course, they wouldn’t have used an unironic term such as “great” to describe any book, especially one that had been assigned to them in an English class; but it was apparent The Catcher in the Rye had moved them in some way. 

At the time, I assumed its appeal was based mainly on the fact that Holden Caulfield—the aimless and alienated narrator who escapes from boarding school and wanders the streets of Manhattan for several nights—used words such as “knockers” and “goddam” and drank and smoked himself into a daze. There was something thrilling about being told to read such a book for a class. 

But there was more to its appeal than that. Even I admitted that it was funny, and when you’re a 16-year-old boy, funniness is everything. “All of a sudden, I did something I shouldn’t have,” Holden says at one point, in the middle of a fight with a girlfriend. “I laughed. And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.”

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