I'm not alone when I say that Salinger's work affected me in a profound way. Reading Catcher in the Rye set the course for my life. It wasn't just that it dealt with being young. There were plenty of other 'young adult' novels which mined themes of alienation and confusion, which I never went back to. Besides, at a gut level, I found music to be more effective when it came to exorcising teen-angst. No, reading that book showed me what literature could be about.
Before then I read mostly sci-fi and fantasy. If I read anything remotely high brow it was the high-lite lit of Irving or Heller. I had heard the title of the book. It sounded vaguely mysterious, who or what was this catcher. It was not required reading at school and I didn't come from a literary household, so I had no idea what the book was about. One day curiosity got the better of me and I borrowed it from the library.
From the very beginning I was hit by the prose. For the first time, I felt as though a book was talking to me. I don't mean in terms of the subject matter. Salinger wasn't even telling my story. I wasn't about to flunk out of school. In fact, Holden would've no doubt had sneered at me if we could have possibly met. I was staid and studious and it took me a long time to let myself go in the way that Holden did. But I don't think Salinger was trying to teach us anything, except how good writing should sound.
Which is what I mean when I say the book talked to me. It sounded so alive, like Holden was there in the room, or inside your head. In literature this type of narration is nothing knew, and if I could remember all the works we studied when I was at school, I'm sure there were lots of first person accounts. But that's the point. They were not memorable. Not like Holden's voice.
I just had to keep reading and I read late into the night absorbed as I had not been before. That voice just kept me from wanting to put the book down I wasn't so concerned about whether he would meet up with Sally, lose his virginity or achieve anything he claimed to do. Some part of you knew he wouldn't, but you still wanted to hear him tell you. It wasn't his brazenness, it wasn't that he was the only one telling it how it was. It doesn't take much to see that Holden is full of the bullshit he inveighs against.
It was the sensitivity that came through. This was especially true when he describes his family, especially his brother Allie. When he mentions the poems Allie would write on his catcher's mitt, I just wanted to know someone like that. I wanted to have a brother like that, or at least know someone.
And it still holds up. I read it again last year. I still felt like joining Holden in tears as he watched his sister Phoebe on the carousel. Partly because of the beauty of the moment, and partly because there was a sense that a story could never be as perfectly told.
Perhaps because the book spoke so directly, and touched me, I wasn't interested too much in Salinger himself. Of course as time went on I heard that he was a recluse, about his spiritual beliefs and his affair with Joyce Maynard, and the more someone remains in hiding the more you think about them. Yet none of this mattered. Now I was content just to have read the book.
I still use Holden's line 'sensitive as a toilet seat' to describe people!
my favourite part of the book is when he flips through his sister's school book, and thinks to himself how he loves doing stuff like that, but can't rationalize why... that's the first time i can remember thinking that a book was speaking to me, instead of at me.