books

Returning to J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel decades after first encountering it in a high-school classroom is a disorienting experience, because the book you remember and the book that actually sits on the page are rarely the same thing. What struck me on a first reading as a manifesto of teenage cool now reads as something far sadder and more exposed - the three-day spiral of a seventeen-year-old boy who has lost his younger brother, failed out of his fourth school, and cannot yet admit that any of it has touched him.

Holden Caulfield remains one of the most divisive narrators in American fiction, and rightly so. On any given page he is funny, cruel, affectionate, snobbish, perceptive, and astonishingly self-deceiving, often all at once. He rails against "phonies" while lying compulsively to strangers on trains. He pities children and patronises adults. He fixates on the shabbiness of other boys' suitcases. Read uncharitably, he is an insufferable rich kid with a thesaurus of one adjective. Read more generously, he is a child in freefall, grasping for anything stable - his sister Phoebe, a carousel, the frozen dioramas at the Museum of Natural History - while the rest of the world insists he grow up on schedule.

The writing itself is where the novel's reputation has best survived. Salinger's first-person voice was genuinely new in 1951 and remains remarkable: a loose, profane, circling monologue that captures the way an anxious adolescent actually thinks, rather than how novelists of the period imagined they did. The cadences can grate - the repetitions of "goddam" and "old" and "if you want to know the truth" are exhausting by design - but they accumulate into something unmistakable. You are not being told about Holden; you are trapped inside him, which is both the book's great achievement and the source of most complaints against it.

What the novel handles less gracefully is the question it pretends to resolve. The famous image of the catcher in the rye - Holden saving children from a cliff-edge - is often read as earned tenderness, but the book undercuts it at every turn. Holden does not really want to save children; he wants to be one. His grief for his brother Allie is the engine of almost everything he does, yet he will not name it, and the adults around him keep failing to notice. The closing pages, set in a psychiatric facility he barely acknowledges, are the quietest and best in the book.

Whether Catcher still shocks is another matter. Stripped of its banned-book notoriety, its swearing is tame, its sexual content timid, its rebellions modest. What endures is not the scandal but the portrait - imprecise, unfair, sometimes tedious, occasionally luminous - of a boy who cannot bear the thought of becoming the kind of person he already is. It is a shorter, stranger, more self-defeating novel than its reputation suggests, and better for it.