Rye Observations

It was an accident. I had no intention of reading The Catcher in the Rye again, let alone last summer. It came about because my wife and our adult children got this quaint notion about decluttering the bookshelves at our cottage. The question became: “Prize it or pitch it?”

One of the many decisions I faced was over a 1999 paperback of Salinger: A Biography, by Paul Alexander. I suppose I must have leafed through it at some point, but I had no recollection. So I opened it, hoping to refresh my memory. The farther I read, the more I deplored his attempts to unveil J. D. Salinger as a phony. Alexander reminded me just how vacuous I had found the few attempts at profiling Salinger. At least Ian Hamilton, in his 1988 book, In Search of J. D. Salinger, undertook the reclusive writer’s biography while in thrall to the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield — exploring a connection so many of us had already...