If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it. 

Here are three interesting things about The Catcher in the Rye as a cultural icon. One, it's one of the most critically lauded books of the twentieth century, a regular feature on 'best books' lists, and generally considered a classic. Two, it's one of the most frequently challenged books of the twentieth century; if you want to send a socially conservative library patron into a tailspin, put it on your shelves. (On the other hand, if you want to annoy a culture vulture, leave it off. The librarian's lot is not a happy one.) Three, if you want to get someone really nervous about it, you can point out that assassins have been known to favour it - Mark Chapman had a worn copy in his possession, inscribed 'Dear Holden Caulfield, From Holden Caulfield, This is my statement,' when he was arrested for murdering John Lennon, and John Bardo (murderer of Rebecca Shaeffer) and John Hinckley (attempted murderer of Ronald Reagan) had copies as well.

Now, this last probably merits least attention. Assassination is a copycat game, and the fact that Bardo and Hinckley had copies is probably more a sign that they were Chapman wannabes than anything about the actual book; Chapman himself may have been obsessed with the book, but since he thought that the best way to express his reaction to one artist was to murder another artist, his artistic judgement is pretty dismissable. The character is angry and alienated, so was he, and he was egotistical enough to think this was a reason to demand attention from the world by killing someone capable of creating things he couldn't; assassins of this kind are still with us, and they're basically nasty, selfish little losers who don't deserve our attention - and who are almost certainly imitated because we pay them attention, in fact, so let's mention the whole assassin reputation for the sake of completeness and then move on to talking about things that are actually worth talking about. The book spoke to Chapman because he was young and disaffected, because it spoke to a lot of people who were young and disaffected, most of them better people than him who dealt with their disaffection in less contemptible ways. (And even Chapman acknowledged that Holden Caulfield was not, in fact, violent, and brushed it off with 'But that's fiction.' Assassins find roles to play-act because they want them; they find rationalisations for murder for the same reason.) Disaffected people in general have responded to the book, and it's the disaffection that's the interesting thing.

First published in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye is, among other things, a technically innovative book. Holden's direct, slangy, unpolished voice is very much a voice: a narrator with no Dickensian measure, as the first sentence points out, but with the inarticulacy of speech. Or rather, with the articulacy of speech: Holden's language is of the moment. He speaks of events in the past and describes how he felt at the time, but the emotion invoked is the emotion felt at the time of speaking. He's angry enough to call his childhood 'lousy', to brush it off in a single word, and as a result, all we can gather of this childhood is that he now doesn't want to talk about it. Pain in the past is implied, but conveyed through pain in the present - or at least restless impatience. 'I don't feel like going into it' is as much as he'll tell us right now: we have to stay with him now, to let him decide what he's going to share and when, or we won't learn anything at all. Holden is an aggressive narrator, tense, uncomfortable: the narrative fidgets and twitches, and we have to work out what has happened by watching his reactions to it as much as by hearing his account of it. Unless we take Holden entirely at his word - which is no tribute to Salinger's careful creation of character - the narrative requires us to think and to empathise in order to follow. Angry, unhelpful Holden demands our understanding of his feelings if we're going to understand his story.

At the same time, it's worth noting that this is not an 'overheard' narrative. Holden is not speaking to a third party, but writing to us; for all the speech-like rhythms and idiom, this is a written narrative. Since people generally do not write precisely the way they speak, hesitations and digressions and repetitions and all, the reader must accept a considerable degree of artifice: this is not a stage script, but a written imitation of spoken speech intended to stay on the page. (And Salinger was most reluctant to consider any dramatisations.) We are not in Holden's room, but in Holden's head, somewhere between heard and unheard: while he addresses us directly as a generic 'you', we are not any kind of character beyond that of Constant Reader. Holden is in a sanitarium following a breakdown of his health - 'I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy', he tells us on the first page - and on the last page he mentions that a psychiatrist has been interviewing him (so how much of his breakdown is physical and how much is mental is somewhat left to our judgement; we never see the point at which he's hospitalised). We are not, however, that psychiatrist, nor do we hear what Holden says to him. We are simply a 'you' that Holden chooses to talk to - grudgingly, almost, with a brusque insistence that he'll pick the subject, for reasons he is not open enough, either with us or with himself, to admit. While the speech is slangy, the device is highly literary.

Holden himself is far from illiterate, though. When he speaks of 'David Copperfield kind of crap', the book may be announcing that this is not your father's literature, but Holden is not saying that David Copperfield itself is crap - or at least, not crap enough to refuse to read. Holden begins the story, in fact, with his expulsion from an exclusive private school, an expulsion based on his grades, because through lack of effort, he has failed every subject except English. In other words, English (or rather literature) is the only subject that interests him. It's a reasonable guess that he's citing David Copperfield because he's read it; for a restless teenager, Holden has some pretty cultured reference points.

Actually David Copperfield doesn't say much about how David's parents 'were occupied and all' before his birth: David's birth is the beginning of his story, and he's every bit as self-involved as Holden. There's an element of irony in Salinger's choice: both are novels about misguided, aimless, effectively homeless young men who lack the maturity to locate a central point to their own lives. The difference is primarily that David eventually does manage to mature and settle down and Holden doesn't - but then, David describes his entire life, or at least up to middle age, and Holden only a couple of days. The focus is different: David's personality unfolds over time, Holden's is conveyed in a brief explosion of characteristic behaviour. David's story is about outgrowing immaturity; Holden's is about immaturity itself, a close-up study, interested in the fine details.

In effect, where Dickens is interested in immaturity as a lesson, a time of mistakes that the plot exists to correct, Salinger's focus is on immaturity for its own sake. This is the famous book of adolescence - or at least white, middle-class and above all male adolescence; reading the book as a teenager myself, it was hard to fully identify with a narrator who made generalisations like 'Women kill* me'; (Holden has been educated in all-male schools and states repeatedly that he doesn't understand how girls and women think, which hardly makes a girl think 'That's me!') - and it's because it doesn't treat adolescence as a diversion on the way to adulthood but as a state in itself, a state entirely real and long-lasting to those in the middle of it. And for many an angry teenager, what a relief to be treated as a real person, as a person whose emotional state deserves an actual entire book, not a mere digression. It should be remembered that 1951 was the very early days of the concept of 'teenage years', a time neither adult nor child but a state in itself. Nowadays 'young adult' is a whole literary genre, but in Salinger's time there was no such thing. Holden's disaffected, self-absorbed, impolite, uncertain narrative is, by its very existence, a statement that teenagers are people worth thinking about - even if they're wrong, or ill-mannered, or directionless, they are people whose feelings can be the subject of literature.

Holden's reference, then, is a hint to the reader that we should not expect the neat resolutions and convenient deaths that make David Copperfield's life conclude smoothly. David begins his life with the beginning of his life, as he puts it, but Holden is a young narrator and has neither the patience nor the perspective to go through David's neat summation of all his key experiences. All he can do is take a couple of significant days and throw them in our laps, muddling through them with no clear certainty himself why or how they're so significant. Again, it's a question of character implied rather than described: we have to work out why Holden, out of his whole life, is choosing to give us these particular days. We have to work with him, because he can't work with himself.

For how ungraciously does he ask for our ear! 'If you really want to hear about it,' he greets us, a character who doesn't beg for the Constant Reader's attention but snaps as if the new-found Constant Reader has been begging for his. The tone of that 'really' carries a delicate double meaning, though: on the one hand, it's reluctance: I'm not sure I want to talk about any of it, but if you insist... But on the other hand, there's an immediate demand for authenticity. Famously, Holden rails against 'phoniness' throughout the novel, and 'If you really want to hear about it' can be read another way: if you want to hear what's real about it. That's the slipperiness of grammar: that 'really' could equally apply to 'want' and to 'hear': it could suggest that our wants are importuning him, or that we need to really hear him, and that if we're going to do that, we have to follow his lead, because his choice of subject is part of his selfhood.

Which, of course, it is: what a novelist chooses to include and exclude is as much part of a novel as any specific choice of words. Salinger was unusual, particularly for his time, in choosing to say so much in what he excludes.

Likewise, it's an unusual narrator who begins a novel - and a very unusual novelist who can get away with beginning a novel - with a sentence that actually refuses to tell us things. 'I don't feel like going into it,' Holden says, and what do we hear in his voice? An irritable shrug, or a painful wince? The accurate answer is probably both: this is the skinless hypersensitivity of adolescence, desperately alive to every nuance of 'phoniness' or sadness in the world, and anger and distress are closely intermingled - as witness the way Holden enacts his grief over the death of his little brother by punching out windows until he permanently damages his hand.

But how does Salinger get away with a first sentence that refuses to to talk to us? The answer lies, once again, in implication. There's a lot present in a sentence that purports to stay silent on a subject: Holden's voice, for one thing, is immediately established, but what's also there is a whole list of what Holden doesn't like to consider, and we can learn a lot about a person by hearing what he wants to avoid. His origins, his childhood and his parents aren't just subjects he doesn't 'feel like going into'; they're subjects he can't face sparing even a couple of sentences apiece to sum up. There's something defensive about his opening: for a boy his age, doubtless his parents are important figures in his emotional landscape (whether he wants to admit it or not), and the fact that they can only be understood by their absence from his talk tells us something about them. He's uncomfortably aware that his parents had lives 'before they had me' - the necessary beginnings of adult understanding that makes adolescence so painful, the knowledge that the gods of our childhood are just people and the cosmos does not revolve around us - but not enough at peace with it to say anything about it. (He isn't even at peace enough to settle on a register: 'occupied and all' staggers from formal to phatic in a tiny space, like a drunk knocking around inside a lift.) He won't tell us where he was born, which tells us straight away how rootless he feels: bounced from boarding school to boarding school (at, we later learn, a time when the loss of his beloved brother would naturally make a boy need contact with and support from his remaining family), he has no community, no resting point, no home. There's a lot of misery and doubt in what Holden lists, and he lacks the security to do anything more than call 'crap' what he cannot calmly consider, and hurry along.

For such a non-statement, then, it's a crowded sentence. We are present in it, in our nebulous second-person state; Holden's unnameable home and unreconciled parents are there - and Holden is present, vitally present, his voice forthright yet evasive, wretched yet confrontational, too raw for mercy, from his very first breath.


*'Kill', in this context, means delight or surprise; it's one of the most frequent words in Holden's limited emotional vocabulary.