Word: catcher
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...would've stood there dry-snapping it at him. You just don't have time to crank one in when you need a piece, is all." Higgins may do for "is all" what Salinger's Holden Caulfield did for "and all" in The Catcher in the Rye. Still another Boston locution is the proliferation of the word "there," uttered as often and as meaninglessly as "well" elsewhere in the U.S. To wit: "When he was in Billerica the last time there," or, "So this broad hollers at me there." It would gladden the heart of Gertrude Stein...
...published. Its author: the little-known short-story writer J.D. Salinger. Its narrator: Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old whose picaresque journey took him from Pencey Prep (the third private school from which he had been dismissed) to his home in New York City three days later. The Catcher in the Rye became a prodigious bestseller, transfiguring the emotional landscape, the mores and insights of an entire generation. It gave Salinger an abrupt prominence throughout America, Europe. Asia and Africa, and triggered what Critic George Steiner resentfully labeled "the Salinger industry"-a furious parsing of the author's fragile...
Probably not. Inside every man (all right, and every woman) there is a poet who died young. The youth who read me grow younger each day. You had to read The Catcher in the Rye at Andover, for instance. And the new audience is never very different from the old Holden. They may not know the words, but they can hum along with the malady. My distress is theirs. They, too, long for the role of adolescent savior. They, too, are aware of the imminent death in life. As far as the sexual explosion is concerned, I suspect...
...there is something more important, more durable about The Catcher in the Rye. In the interstices of the memoir were seedling predictions, just waiting for the rain. And it came, it came. Take my love/hate for movies. Wouldn't you know that College English would run a piece, without irony, suggesting that my name, "one suspects"-one maybe, two never-"is an amalgam of the last names of Movie Stars William Holden and Joan Caulfield." Yeah, well . . . And yet my obsessive cinematic fantasies were really everyone's hang-up with nostalgia, camp and collective memory. Remember me camping...
Comparisons with The Catcher in the Rye are inevitable, simply because all novels about youth in flight are still measured against Salinger's. But what such a weighing shows is chiefly that Yglesias' tone-far more detached than Salinger's-is completely his own and that Holden Caulfield would now be pushing 40. Salinger's novel is a wholly mature work. Yglesias is still capable of childish sentences. But his is a superior novel, without regard to the age of its author. In the end, when Raul has dropped out of school for good...