Manhattan Adult Entertainment: ‘In this world but not of it’
The big deal is that throughout his career Salinger kept the one thing that is essential to every cultural legend: mystique. The Catcher in the Rye itself is as much of an enigma as its author. Its narrator is Holden Caulfield, a rebellious schoolboy who despises the weak figures of authority and ‘phony’ kids around him. Expelled from his prep school, he takes the train to New York, where he spends three days in a blur of loneliness, encountering girls, museums and his old English teacher, all the while his disaffection increasing. He dreams of becoming a noble savage guarding children from the lousy hypocrisy of the adult world: he will wait at the edge of the rye field to ward them away from the cliff.
The book was a Molotov cocktail cast into the middle of postwar America. Caulfield’s instability, his encounter with the prostitute Sunny, and above all the graphic language of his narrative drew savage opprobrium and fanatic admiration to the boy hero. …