Reading The Catcher in the Rye in high school once carried a certain edgy credibility. Holden Caulfield was the embodiment of youthful alienation for generations of readers and critics. Novelist Joseph O’Connor recalls how, “like many teenaged readers”, he “felt like Holden was talking to me – perhaps to me alone” on first reading the novel in 1981.
This was the obvious irony of readers’ identification with J.D. Salinger’s teenaged loner: if everyone identifies with him, how unique is he really? Perhaps every teenager has at least a few hours where they think of themselves as singular, authentic, misunderstood.
