The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger(1951)
Extract
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.
A red hunting hat, worn backwards, moves through the streets of midtown Manhattan on a cold December weekend, and beneath it a sixteen-year-old boy just expelled from his fourth prep school is trying to find one honest thing in a world he keeps calling phony. Published in 1951, the novel gave voice to adolescent alienation for generations who recognized in Holden Caulfield's restless, contradictory narration their own fury and their own tenderness. He wants to protect children running through the rye from falling off the cliff, which is to say he wants to stop time, to keep innocence from crossing into the corruption he already inhabits. He cannot. That is what breaks him, and what makes him unforgettable.
If you loved this
Joyce wrote the first great novel of adolescent self-exile, but Stephen walks toward art instead of away from everything.
Plath takes Holden's alienation and gives it a gender, a bell jar, and no exit.
Hesse sends another man disgusted by the world into a night that breaks him open.