Joseph O’Connor in The Guardian:
In 1981, when I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a paperback of her dad’s favourite novel. I’d never heard of it despite living in a home full of books. My parents loved the work of Edna O’Brien, Muriel Spark, John le Carré, Dickens. So did I. But encountering the first sentence of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye made the world burst into colour. “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, if you want to know the truth.”
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.
More here.
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