Joseph O’Connor in The Guardian:
It had never occurred to me that writing could make your blood fizz with delight. I don’t exaggerate when I say Salinger had the same effect on me as hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time. This was Pretty Vacant in prose. And though it was published 75 years ago this month, it’s still as captivating, bold and transgressive as ever.
The action takes place over three days and nights in December 1949. Our narrator, Holden Caulfield, is 17, chronicling events that befell him a year ago, when he was expelled from his boarding school, Pencey Prep, where the only thing he learned is that “All morons hate it when you call them a moron.” A restless, unknowingly witty Irish-American kid, he has a wry watchfulness that counterpoints his naivety. Flitting from Pencey a few days early, he bunks off to Manhattan, where his parents and sister live. The plan is to put up in a flophouse and assemble his excuses. A born fantasist, he can’t resist dissembling to anyone he meets along the way, but his gaucheness keeps tripping him up. “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.”
The Catcher in the Rye has almost no plot.
More here.
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