Goodbye, Mr. Salinger

J.D. Salinger, January 1, 1919 - January 27, 2010

I received J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye for Christmas during high school, and it is one of those precious books that had a true impact on my life. I've often said that if you're not a teenager and you try to read The Catcher in the Rye, you probably won't like it. I was fortunate enough to read it at the exact right time in my life, and as a teenager I was sucked into Holden Caulfield's mind and universe.

I devoured the book in a couple of days during winter break. I remember staying up late into the night reading, and the chill I got not because my parent's house was always as cold as a fridge, not because there was ice on the windows of my room, not because I could almost hear the snow crystallizing as it froze outside, but because of one passage from Salinger's book. I don't know if I was tired from it being so late and having read so long, or if I had been transported to a strange emotional place because of the book, but that moment has stuck with me, when my whole body and being was unsettled by these words:

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd be the catcher in the rye."

There's nothing creepy about that passage, and in fact it almost invokes happy images of protected children in a field where the sun streams down in golden rays, but at that moment when I read it, I felt very weird. I felt moved, to be sure, but to a dark place. Maybe, if I had time to psychoanalyze it all, it was because a part of me realized how alone, how much of an outsider Holden was, and how I could be that. We all could be that. And though we want something that seems pure and honest, at the same time it is something impossible, impractical. We can't protect all the children from the cliff no more than we can protect ourselves from it.

But I don't want to psychoanalyze. I merely want to comment on how much of an impact Catcher had on me, how much I was moved by Salinger's words which were poetic in their use of teenage language. I wanted to comment on Mr. Salinger's death, and how a legend has passed away.

Many news sources have written insightful and interesting little pieces on his life, on his impact. Pieces that are much better than this one. But all those guys, they're phonies.

A last little piece of cynicism to wrap up this post: it is quite likely that right now deals are being made for a Catcher movie. Salinger refused to sell the film rights of his book while he was alive, but now that he's dead there's no stopping Hollywood. And knowing Hollywood, they'll do it wrong. "We love the piece, we do, but nothing happens! It's three hours of a kid walking around New York and that don't sell tickets. We modernize it. Set it in present day. And hey, what if Holden was on the run from the law? Now wouldn't that spice up the third act?!"

The truth is, even if you had the best in film-making behind the adaptation, your chances of making a good film out a piece that is so internal, so focused on inner conflict is slim to none. As Robert McKee says in his book Story, "The purer the novel...the worse the film."