Anyone who has read J.D.
Salinger's New Yorker stories ? particularly A Perfect Day for
Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For
Esme ? With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that
his first novel is fully of children. The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER
IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named
Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult,
secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and
goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at
once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about
him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is
that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty
but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this
novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's
voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet
remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly
articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers
and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain
to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with
all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.
