‘I felt Holden was talking to me alone’: The Catcher in the Rye at 75

“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.

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. In fact, it seems suspicious of narrative, literature and all forms of storytelling. Conventional biography is mistrusted, the movies are “phoney”, Shakespeare’s plays make no sense. The hero’s brother, DB, a screenwriter, has sold out his talent and is likened to a prostitute. The novel brilliantly mistrusts itself by challenging its own purpose.

What’s most remarkable about the book is how it alters its meanings depending on the reader’s age. Only the greatest novels manage this alchemy. The Catcher is in the same league as Ulysses or The Handmaid’s Tale in having built into its texture a perpetual self-regeneration. I return to it every few years, the closest thing in my life to a pilgrimage. Whenever I do, I’m reading a different novel, as vivid, strange, edgy and unnerving as the one that switched on my lights 45 years ago.

Holden’s wanderings around Manhattan, trying on adulthood, inviting strangers to “have a cocktail” with him, seem riotously funny to a young reader. “Life is a game, boy,” one grownup tells him. “Game, my ass,” Holden retorts. His antics call to mind Graham Greene’s verdict on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, a book that brings “the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage”. Here’s a kid who has no rules or boundaries, drifting around the Big Apple in a haze of splendid haplessness that is never less than weirdly heroic. Rubbishing everything he sees, oscillating between superiority and dread, he keeps up a commentary so beautifully sardonic that you find yourself cheering it on. “And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.”

But an older reader sees Holden’s isolation. Behind the teenage mouthiness is a roiling mass of neurosis. Jealous, insecure, frightened, frustrated, Holden has suffered terrible losses, including the death from leukaemia of his brother, Allie, and is writing his chronicle in a psychiatric hospital. He feels himself “disappear”, finds it hard to think. “I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.” It’s possible he has been molested by a schoolteacher, although the incident is recalled with such ambivalence that we’re never quite sure what happened. Holden’s only tender feelings are towards women or children. The men in the book are schlubs or bores, but Holden’s frequent attempts to forgive them lead to memorable moments of faint praise. “I don’t know about bores. Maybe you shouldn’t feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don’t hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they’re secretly all terrific whistlers or something.”

Like many teenage readers, I felt Holden was talking to me – perhaps to me alone – and that my responses to what he was saying were somehow part of the novel. I even felt he was listening. This was something new and wonderful: fiction as friendship. “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

The Catcher in the Rye is from a different world, an era when teenagers didn’t have too many rights. But somehow, it’s still around, so profoundly a part of the literary landscape that it can go unnoticed in the haze. I owe it, because it’s the novel that changed my life. By the time I finished reading Holden’s story, I wanted to be a writer myself.

Joseph O’Connor’s novel The Ghosts of Rome is published by Harvill Secker.