The Catcher in the Rye
Holden Caulfield leaves Pencey Prep and wanders Manhattan for a few days, spending money he does not have, lying to strangers, and telephoning people who are visibly tired of him. Salinger's trick is to make the voice so immediate that the reader notices Holden's cruelty and tenderness at the same time. The novel is less about teenage rebellion than about the difficulty of mourning a dead brother while the adults around you perform competence and the city keeps moving.Little, Brown has kept the book in print for decades because it functions as both a school assignment and something adolescents actually finish. The ducks in Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, the prostitute Sunny: these details have outlasted generations of attempts to ban the book. It remains a novel for anyone who has ever been sixteen and certain that the adults are performing a script they do not believe.
