‘I heard Holden talking to myself’: The Catcher in the Rye at 75 | JD Salinger

Men 1981, when I was 17 years old, my first boyfriend gave me a copy of a book that his father liked very much. I had never heard of this even though I lived in a house full of books. My parents loved the work of Edna O’Brien, Muriel Spark, John le Carré, Dickens. I did too. But coming across the first sentence of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye made the world more beautiful.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you want to know is where I was born, and what my childhood was like, and how busy my parents were with everything before they had me, and all the rest of David Copperfield, but I don’t want to go into that, if you want to know the truth.”

I never thought that writing could make your blood happy. I am not exaggerating when I say that Salinger had the same effect on me as hearing The Sex Pistol for the first time. This was Pretty Vacant in prose. And even though it was published 75 years ago this month, it’s still as compelling, daring and groundbreaking as ever.

The act took place over three days and nights in December 1949. Our narrator, Holden Caulfield, is 17 years old, recounting the events that happened to him a year ago, when he was kicked out of his boarding school, Pencey Prep, where the only thing he learned was “All stupid people hate it when you call them stupid.” A restless, naive Irish-American kid, he has an alertness that belies his naivety. Flying from Pencey a few days early, he flew to Manhattan, where his parents and sister live. The process is to put it in the flophouse and collect the reasons for it. A born fantasy, she can’t resist devoting herself to anyone she meets along the way, but her courage gets her down. “I’m the worst liar you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s so bad. When I go to the store to buy a magazine, even if someone asks me where I’m going, I have to say I’m going to the opera.”

The Catcher in the Rye has no plot. In fact, it seems questionable stories, writings and all kinds of stories. History is not believed, movies are “phony”, Shakespeare’s plays are not understood. The hero’s brother, DB, a photographer, has sold his talent and is compared to a prostitute. The book is very self-doubting in its opposition to its purpose.

The most interesting thing about this book is how it changes its meaning according to the age of the reader. Only the great books master this alchemy. The Catcher is in the same league as Ulysses or The Handmaid’s Tale in making its characters endlessly evolving. I go back every few years, the closest thing to a pilgrimage. Every time I do, I read a book that’s as different, as colorful, as strange, as exciting, and as unnerving as the one that turned my lights on 45 years ago.

Holden’s wandering around Manhattan, trying to grow up, inviting strangers to “be with him” seems funny to a young reader. An old man tells him: “Life is a game. “A game, my ass,” Holden replies. His humor is reminiscent of Graham Greene’s quote from Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-birds., a book that brings “the kind of glee you get when people smash something on stage”. Here’s a kid with no rules or boundaries, walking around the Big Apple in an incredibly sad state that’s an amazing hero. Disturbing everything he sees, moving between excitement and fear, he keeps a comment so beautiful that you enjoy it. “And I have a really loud, silly laugh.

But the older reader sees Holden’s isolation. The back of the mouth of young people has a serious problem of neurosis. Jealous, insecure, scared, depressed, Holden has suffered many losses, including the death of his brother from leukemia, Allie, and is writing his history in a mental hospital. He feels “lost”, he finds it difficult to think. I can’t explain what I mean, and even if I could, I don’t know how to feel. It is possible that she was molested by a school teacher, although the story is so vaguely remembered that we do not know what happened. Holden’s only love is for women or children. The men in the book are either schlubs or bores, but Holden’s frequent attempts to forgive them lead to memorable moments of low praise. “I don’t know about bores, maybe you shouldn’t be so sad when you see a girl who is married to them marrying them.” They don’t hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe secretly they’re all whistleblowers or something.”

Like many young readers, I felt that Holden was speaking to me – perhaps to myself – and that my responses to what he was saying were part of the book. I also felt that he was listening. This was something new and strange: fiction as friendship. “What fascinates me the most is a book that, after reading it, you wish the author of the book was your best friend and you call him whenever you want. That doesn’t happen very often.”

The Catcher in the Rye is from another world, a time when young people didn’t have much freedom. But somehow, it still exists, so deeply a part of the written record that it can go unnoticed in the fog. I owe it to you, because it is a book that changed my life. When I finished reading Holden’s story, I wanted to become a writer myself.

A book by Joseph O’Connor Spirits of Rome is published by Harville Secker.