{"id":8297,"date":"2010-01-28T14:30:40","date_gmt":"2010-01-28T19:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=8297"},"modified":"2010-01-28T14:30:40","modified_gmt":"2010-01-28T19:30:40","slug":"tenth-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=8297","title":{"rendered":"Tenth Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

J. D. Salinger is dead<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He’s most famous – at least among the non-English-Department crowd –\u00a0for Catcher in the Rye<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cCatcher\u201d was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: \u201cIf you really want to hear about it, the first thing you\u2019ll 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\u2019t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, \u201cCatcher\u201d became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America\u2019s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.<\/p>\n

With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden\u2019s two favorite expressions are \u201cphony\u201d and \u201cgoddam\u201d), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading \u201cCatcher\u201d used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner\u2019s permit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Musta been a baby-boomer thing; I hated Catcher<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

No, that’s not true; I hated Holden Caulfield.\u00a0 Viscerally.\u00a0 Down in the pit of my stomach, I wanted to strangle that moopy little fop.\u00a0 I don’t even know why.\u00a0 I last read the book when I was 18; Caulfield filled me with revulsion so intense I could taste it.\u00a0 Maybe that’s the mark of a good book – or maybe someone who probably wasn’t an especially sophisticated reader.\u00a0 Not sure yet.<\/p>\n

I probably should give Catcher <\/em>another try, to see if the lack of post-adolescent emotion or hormones opens something up to me that I missed before.<\/p>\n

Until then?\u00a0 Sorry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

J. D. Salinger is dead. He’s most famous – at least among the non-English-Department crowd –\u00a0for Catcher in the Rye: \u201cCatcher\u201d was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: \u201cIf you really want to hear about it, the first thing you\u2019ll probably […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-memoriam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8297"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8298,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8297\/revisions\/8298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}