The death of J.D. Salinger leads Lance Mannion to wonder if there are any writers nowadays whose books can be stolen from parents’ bookshelves by teenagers. (Lance wonders more than this for he’s no mere Manichean Mannion; the man sees beyond light and shade, he’s an adept of the gray areas.) But his basic premise is good. Books reach kids and become important to them insofar as books are in the tribal circle. T’was my dad gave me Catcher in the Rye –he had it on his bookshelf along with novels by John Updike, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, William Manchester’s A Thousand Days, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, countless books really. The tribal circle…
When I think back I seem to recall that I didn’t like Holden Caulfield very much. I was, after all, a kid with a disability and I didn’t think Holden had it so bad. I saw that the narrator was shallow. How old was I? 12 I think. I was in the 6th grade. I had glasses as thick as dinner plates and I could only read with one eye by holding the book to the end of my nose. Kids made fun of me wherever I went. Holden Caulfied was a whiner.
Stay with me. I’m trying to spin two plates at once. Books matter insofar as kids find them in the tribal circle. I didn’t like Catcher in the Rye but it did something for me. In turn, I loved Catch 22 and that lead me to Mailer and Capote.
Still one does indeed wonder in these post-middlebrow times when the novel has been bumped off of TV (can you imagine Conan or Leno having a novelist on their meager shows?) just “what” would fall off mom and pop’s bookshelf and turn kids on?
Of course because I teach nonfiction two best selling books from “the fourth genre” come to mind: The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr and NIck Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. I can imagine these books falling into teenaged hands and lighting up the dendrites of suspicion and incipient wickedness that’s so necessary for independence.
Now it’s a little tough. Who has taken the place of Vonnegut? Who reaches the prematurely wisened super egos of teens because the books fall from the shelves into their hands?
We ought to be worried about this. How about a stimulus plan to encourage Book of the Month Club subscriptions for the nation’s struggling middle class parents?
I’m not kidding.
Catcher in the Rye sold 250,000 new copies last year. To which I say thank God for that.
Here’s what I liked back then, oh yeah baby:
Well, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a
little anxious. Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that
time, like a comet. LIKE a comet! Why, Peters, I laid over the
lot of them! Of course there warn’t any of them going my way, as a
steady thing, you know, because they travel in a long circle like
the loop of a lasso, whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart
for the Hereafter; but I happened on one every now and then that
was going my way for an hour or so, and then we had a bit of a
brush together. But it was generally pretty one-sided, because I
sailed by them the same as if they were standing still. An
ordinary comet don’t make more than about 200,000 miles a minute.
Of course when I came across one of that sort – like Encke’s and
Halley’s comets, for instance – it warn’t anything but just a flash
and a vanish, you see. You couldn’t rightly call it a race. It
was as if the comet was a gravel-train and I was a telegraph
despatch. But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I
used to flush a comet occasionally that was something LIKE. WE
haven’t got any such comets – ours don’t begin. One night I was
swinging along at a good round gait, everything taut and trim, and
the wind in my favor – I judged I was going about a million miles a
minute – it might have been more, it couldn’t have been less – when
I flushed a most uncommonly big one about three points off my
starboard bow. By his stern lights I judged he was bearing about
northeast-and-by-north-half-east. Well, it was so near my course
that I wouldn’t throw away the chance; so I fell off a point,
steadied my helm, and went for him. You should have heard me whiz,
and seen the electric fur fly! In about a minute and a half I was
fringed out with an electrical nimbus that flamed around for miles
and miles and lit up all space like broad day.
That’s of course from Mark Twain’s story “Captain Stormfield” –the Captain dies and goes to heaven only to discover that its so vapid he’d rather go to hell.
This is far better than Holden Caulfield.
Funnier too.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Holden Revisited. Yes, of course, SK, Holden was a “whiner”. He was an adolescent, and that was the beauty of Catcher in the Rye. In our retrospective, ofttimes revisionist, collective unconsciousness, we catch the wave of puberty with boogie board in hand and shoot the curl in flawless rapture. In reality, many of us (including people without any government-verifiable disabilities) are splashing about in the waters of childhood one moment, then almost without warning, the waves engulf us and after what seems like an eternity of untold agony and humiliation, throw us half-drowned on the shores of adulthood. Thank you, J.D. Salinger, for having the courage and genius to express the unadorned truth.
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Kids don’t give a damn about what’s on their parents’ bookshelves. They’ve got Harry Potter books and a whole slew of writers who pitch directly at an audience that has their own disposable income and no sense but to spend it. Beyond that, they have the boundless universe of cyberspace.
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