In 1981, when Joseph O'Connor was 17, his first girlfriend gave him a paperback of her father's favourite novel: JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Despite growing up in a home full of books, he had never heard of it. Encountering the first sentence made the world burst into colour, he recalls.
A Novel That Changed a Life
O'Connor, now a novelist, says Salinger had the same effect on him as hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time. 'This was Pretty Vacant in prose,' he writes, noting that 75 years after its publication, the book remains captivating, bold, and transgressive.
The action takes place over three days and nights in December 1949. Narrator Holden Caulfield, 17, chronicles events from a year earlier when he was expelled from boarding school. A restless, unknowingly witty Irish-American kid, he bunks off to Manhattan, where his parents and sister live. He puts up in a flophouse and assembles his excuses, dissembling to everyone he meets.
Plotless Yet Profound
The Catcher in the Rye has almost no plot. It seems suspicious of narrative, literature, and all forms of storytelling. Conventional biography is mistrusted, the movies are 'phoney', and Shakespeare's plays make no sense. The novel brilliantly mistrusts itself by challenging its own purpose.
What's most remarkable is how it alters its meanings depending on the reader's age. Only the greatest novels manage this alchemy, O'Connor says, comparing it to Ulysses or The Handmaid's Tale. He returns to it every few years, the closest thing in his life to a pilgrimage.
Different Readings at Different Ages
Holden's wanderings around Manhattan, trying on adulthood and inviting strangers to have a cocktail, seem riotously funny to a young reader. 'Life is a game, boy,' one grownup tells him. 'Game, my ass,' Holden retorts. His antics call to mind Graham Greene's verdict on Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, a book that brings 'the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage.'
But an older reader sees Holden's isolation. Behind the teenage mouthiness is a roiling mass of neurosis. Jealous, insecure, frightened, frustrated, Holden has suffered terrible losses, including the death from leukaemia of his brother Allie, and is writing his chronicle in a psychiatric hospital. He feels himself 'disappear' and finds it hard to think.
A Personal Connection
Like many teenage readers, O'Connor felt Holden was talking to him alone, and that his responses were somehow part of the novel. 'This was something new and wonderful: fiction as friendship,' he writes. Holden himself says, 'What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.'
The Catcher in the Rye is from a different world, an era when teenagers didn't have many rights. But it remains profoundly part of the literary landscape. O'Connor credits it as the novel that changed his life: by the time he finished reading Holden's story, he wanted to be a writer himself.
