[tretcheenia]

The first time I read "Catcher in The Rye" it was almost freshly published and it was being talked about by a lot of the kids at school. I was told by someone that it was about a kid in a private school who winds up in New York City. I was just passing into the same adolesent phase that good old Holden Caulfield was experincing, I was adrift at a private school and I enjoyed reading, so I went looking for it.

Eventually, I saw it in a drugstore book rack and I spent a few minutes scanning some pages when I suddenly WANTED the book. It seemed, on quick observation, to contain some information that I needed to know more about, so I got it and read it all and when I turned out the light at 3 AM, I put it down with a silent ..."Wow".

It was like Salinger had been sneaking around behind my back, cleverly stalking me, taking secretive, copious notes about the things that an angst- driven teen does with his life, then running back to his log cabin somewhere, writing down all he just saw me do for MONTHS and making good old Holden Caulfield do the same things in just one day...

For example- Caulfield's prep school, from which he was irresponsibly fleeing, was named Pensy Prep and was located in some vague town somewhere in Upstate New York.
I was attending prep school at Manlius Academy -- a private military school-- just outside of Syracuse in the farmland countryside of rolling hills and sudden waterfalls, a very vague place if you ask me. It was a nice enough place and all, but I desperately wanted to flee from it. We used to speculate, my classmates and I, if Manlius might have been the prototype for the muddily described Pensy Prep. We all wanted to hitchhike to New York. The descriptions were SO close.
Private hubris at a private school.
Still, it WAS Upstate New York, just like Holden's place.
I read it cover-to-cover in my dorm room after lights out, the same kind of a room old Holden was trying to escape from. I used a flashlight under the covers.
And I never took up fencing but I WAS on the basketball team until I broke my ankle.

We had to wear quasi-military uniforms at good old Manlius, with neckties. So did he, only his uniform was the school blazer; still, his clothes made him what he was.
He had a younger sister who he was trying to make safe from the phoney people ( who were all around him and not even paying any attention to him.).
I had a younger sister who was turning phoney as fast as the Autumn leaves were turning-- but I had way too many people paying attention to me to go help her...
There were a lot of other little coincidences, words torn from the pages of my life. How did JD Salinger actually KNOW about all that???

Anyway, it was the first book that I actually IDENTIFIED with and I've probably re-read it twenty simes since that first read. It STILL resonates. I've made my kids read it when they were just starting High School, and they both thank me for introducing them to Holden Caulfield and his teenage demons.
I've read all of Salinger's books and none of them even came close to his first effort. He has a very uniqe writing style, too, but he never seemed to capture the inner narratives, the exposition of his characters or the cadence of the prose as well in his subsequent books.

I have gone through two copies of the paperback over the years, but I still have the same book, the one I took off the drugstore book rack back when Kennedy was President. It's all yellowed out and dusty and the cover has faded to beige and the glue cracks when I turn pages, so these days I sort of look at rather than touch it. It sits safely on the shelf, and everytime I glance at the cracked spine it makes me remember what it means to me.

It's probably the best book I've ever read.