Holden Steady

The best obituary I’ve ever read is a tribute to my favorite novel.

I was going to write “the best novel I ever read” because that would have made for a better sentence. But I don’t suppose The Catcher in the Rye is the best novel I ever read, in terms of language and plot. Although I’m not a huge reader of novels and have terribly retention of the ones I have read, I seem to recall that Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys blew me away, for instance. But if I’m honest with myself, I have to concede that, even though it sounds unoriginal and probably dated in the year 2014 to say so, Catcher, the coming-of-age classic from 1951, is the novel I most cherish within my admittedly limited sample size.

You’d think I’d remember how old I was when I first read it, but I don’t. I probably was in my late teens. I definitely hadn’t yet come of age, although I’m not quite sure what that even means, or whether I ever made that transition. It seems to connote a level of maturity or comfort in one’s own skin that, by the end of The Catcher in the Rye, seems perhaps graspable for protagonist Holden Caulfield, but remains tentative. I still feel that way much of the time, even now, about my own maturity and self-assurance.

Anyway, last week on public radio’s The Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor quoted the book’s revolutionary-in-its-time first line on the 63rd anniversary of Catcher’s publication. It reads, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” The recitation brought back to me how Holden’s voice and worldview are there from the get-go, and how I knew at that moment I knew this was a story I wanted to hear, as opposed to read. (If you don’t know the difference, you’re probably more into that David Copperfield kind of crap than I am.)

Much has been written over the decades about how JD Salinger’s story of a young prep school kid trying to figure out life transcends its privileged trappings to become a universal tale of every teen’s struggles with peer pressure, sexuality, adult hypocrisy, grief and all the other things that stretch a young person’s ability to cope. I certainly felt immediately that I’d found a friend and fellow traveler in Holden, as so many other readers had—and presumably still do, although with the Internet and social media the escape routes from feelings of emotional isolation that now are available to young people are multitudinous.

And then, of course, interest in and attention to The Catcher in the Rye were rekindled in early 2010 by the death of Salinger at age 91. We were reminded at that time that Holden’s creator had been not only a longtime recluse but also a seeming creep who fed on impressionable young women and couldn’t take a compliment on his work without shaking his fist and screaming at you to get the hell off his lawn. While he shared some of Holden’s crankiness, Salinger didn’t seem like a guy who his vulnerable but essentially hopeful literary creation would’ve much liked.

What I loved about the obituary of Salinger, though, was that it ignored all that and reconciled author and protagonist in a send-up that was worthy of Catcher itself. It ran not in the New York Times, but, naturally, in The Onion. And, despite the outsized impact that Salinger’s slim output had on 20th century literature, the obit was far from Dickens-sized. Like Catcher, it was short and packed with attitude. Its headline was “Bunch of Phonies Mourn JD Salinger.” Here it is in its entirety:

In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author JD Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. “He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers,” said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don’t have to look at them for four years. “There will never be another voice like his.” Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it’s just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything. 

Ha! If that isn’t perfect, I don’t know what is.

Just a few days after Garrison Keillor’s notation of the publication anniversary, I was walking back to my car, having completed my Sunday-morning run. I was on MacArthur Boulevard in Cabin John. I’m used to peering down at cigarette butts, beer cans and other litter, despite the best efforts of Adopt-a-Road monitor Kepler Framing, in the person of our delightfully eccentric friend Ritch Kepler. But this time I happened upon a rarity—a book. It was rain-soaked but readable, open to a spread of pages. At first I passed it by, but then my curiosity got the better of me. I wondered what book it was.

You know where I’m going with this, but I’m not making this up. It really was The Catcher in the Rye. It was open to the chapter in which this girl named Sally suggests that she and Holden go skating at the Radio City ice rink, and Holden figures out that the reason she’s so “hot to go” is that she “wanted to see herself in one of those little skirts that just come down over their butt and all.” In a scene that well-represents the entire book, Holden kind of hates the superficial Sally and feels sorry for her at the same time, because she’s a terrible skater and is killing her ankles. He’s also chagrined to concede “how cute her little ass looked” in the skating skirt.

I saw the book’s roadside presence as a sign that I must in some way blog about The Catcher in the Rye. I just didn’t know quite what I wanted to say about it. Then, yesterday, I saw a link from the Washington Post to a piece about how Bethesda has made some group’s list of the “Top 10 Snobbiest Small Cities in America.” I clicked on it since I, too, think Bethesda is incredibly snobby (even though it’s my mailing address), and I was ready to read this vindication of my view. As it turned out, however, the designation was misleading. A real estate website had assigned the ranking to Bethesda based on such measures as household income, education levels and private school attendance, rather than having made any attempt to tabulate and quantify the stuck-up unpleasantness of the citizenry.

Well, no matter, I thought. Cabin John is essentially Bethesda, and surely I could figure out something clever to say about having found a book that indicts phonies blithely chucked aside in a town that’s full of them. Except that I spent the next several days thinking on it and came up with nothing beyond the basic premise. And anyway, I got to thinking, are snobs and phonies precisely synonymous? Also, isn’t one of the points of The Catcher in the Rye to point out that nobody is pure, and that a certain amount of “phoniness” is acceptable and even necessary, lest the societal order fall apart?

The task I’d laid out for myself started to seem too complicated, contrived, even boring to complete. And why should anything related to The Catcher in the Rye run the risk of being boring, when the novel is anything but?

That’s when I thought about the obituary, which actually is posted on my office bulletin board.

It’s great, as is the novel it parodies and celebrates. And that’s the heart of what I really wanted to say today about The Catcher in the Rye. There's no need to complicate things and get all David Copperfield about it.