The catcher in the rye is an extraordinary book - extraordinary in the sense that nothing like it has probably ever been written in the whole history of mankind (or at least as much of it as I happen to know, anyway). This is my all time favourite book, and you might expect more on this from me - hence the title 'first post'. Salinger was an author par excellence, although that's not an expression he'd himself use, for his detestation for 'phony' words was proverbial. So with due respect to Jerome D. I'd try from now on to keep it to bi-syllables at best.
There's this guy you see, Holden. Holden is a darned bad student (although by no means a bad learner) and when he flunks in all four subjects but English, he is given the sack at the esteemed Prencey Prep school. Not wishing to cause further anguish to his long tormented parents (Holden had lost a brother, Allie to leukaemia four years prior to the time of this book. His brother's death forever haunts him), he decides to run away all alone to his hometown, (that's New York City for you) without giving a damn as to what he would be doing there.
So Holden, who's a rich man's son, promptly runs up to this real charming hotel where all sorts of 'flits', 'perverts', whores and the omnipresent 'phonies' rule the roost. However there's this one question that's on his mind all the time, and which he puts forward to the cabbies and such, namely, where do the ducks at Central Park go when the lake freezes over (Holden, he himself confesses is slightly on the retarded side as things go), and he discovers to his utter surprise that this question is kind of a taboo, and nobody wants to hear about it. It is as if they are suddenly awaken to there own ignorance, or are ashamed of the fact that they didn't think it out for themselves.
The duck question and the school expulsion thing are not the only troubles Holden has. The real menace, the one that he shall have to put up with all his life is an unsurpassingly keen, almost perfect sense of beauty, and this world, in all its ugliness often beyond his endurance.Therefore he is forever bored of just about everything, even the things that he likes to do, such as watching movies, or talking to girls he knows. His sole aspiration in life is to be 'The Catcher in The Rye' - he sees his world as a field of rye in which children are playing and there's this edge of this cliff. Holden merely wants to wait by there and watch them play, and catch anyone if they are about to go over the edge.
Holden doesn't like to talk to people much, although he's glib enough when he does. What he plans to do is pretend that he's a deaf- mute. In that way he wouldn't be expected to talk to anyone and since to talk to him people would have to write it down or something, they would soon get tired of it and learn to keep away. Then he'd take this job down at some gas station, where he'd be able to earn his keep, and then maybe he'd meet up with this really beautiful deaf-mute girl, then they'd marry and she'll be making these babies whom they'll give real nice books to read (Holden was a voracious reader, taking in just about everything from classics to more contemporary works) and this way the'd have the time of their life.
I shan't tell you about how he finally got back home and made it up with his parents and his little sister Phoebe ( who is seven and writes detective novels under various 'pseodo-middle-nyms' and is currently taking lessons in belching from a classmate) or even what all adventures he had during his exile, because for one thing the actual storyline, plot etc. hardly matter. Its all about Holden and what goes inside that head (with quite a lot of gray hairs) of his. Neither will I do the fatal error of analyzing it, as subjecting a work to critical analysis is probably the cruelest thing you can do to literature. So this is where I bid adieu to my readers, only to show up unperturbed by the scarcity of comments with the very next post.
Yours sincerely
Jude
