Word: holden
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...summer of 1951, a modest 277-page book was 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...
...wave in a storm, a dancer's leap never turn out to be as high as we had hoped." The tide has gone out; the factories of the Salinger industry have experienced vast layoffs; the author himself has not communicated with his readers for seven years. And Holden Caulfield-has his voice been muted by his creator's silence? What happens to a prodigy two decades after his debut, when he is pushing 40? An admirer can only hazard a guess...
...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 a lot of what...
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...
WHERE HAS TOMMY FLOWERS GONE? Tommy is a sort of Holden Caulfield at 30, an asphalt urchin who is tart, smart and often touching...