Author: Philip J Reed

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year.

Title: Ulysses
Author: James Joyce
Year: 1922

James Joyce, perhaps more than any other single author who’s ever lived, gets a lot of credit for redefining the novel. Here’s the interesting thing: he deserves all of it.

Joyce redefined what reading meant. He demolished boundaries, both in a literary sense and a social sense. He introduced many readers to a kind of writing they didn’t believe could exist, and believed even less that it could work.

James Joyce, that is to say, is one of very few people who changed the world.

That sounds like high praise. It sounds even more like that when you realize he did this through an extraordinarily short career, which consisted mainly of just three novels and a collection of short stories.

With only a handful of titles to his name, James Joyce changed literature.

Actually, let’s not mince words; with one title, James Joyce changed literature.

Dubliners may well be the best short story collection in the English language, but outside of the meticulous recreation of its central city, it wasn’t pushing any boundaries. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was influential, and rightly so, but I’m not sure that any of its ideas aren’t more fully and more successfully explored by Ulysses. And Finnegans Wake‘s biggest achievement is that anyone wanted to publish it; it was a more daring experiment than it was a successful one.

With Ulysses, though, Joyce struck an immortal chord, and we’re still hearing it resonate today.

Even if you don’t read, you owe something to Ulysses. Perhaps it’s the fact that Joyce’s crippling fight through obscenity trials allows you to experience works of art that others would seek to forbid you, for one reason or another. Perhaps it’s the book’s profound, incredible ability to tear down the walls of structure, paving the way for concept albums, bottle episodes, experimental films, and every other kind of art that attempts to transcend the agreed-upon boundaries. Or maybe it’s as simple as the fact that it presented “stream of consciousness” as a viable way for an author to express himself.

So many things we take for granted we can trace to Ulysses. And we can jump back and read the novels published before it, and see just how urgent and massive a change it really represented.

With Ulysses, Joyce knew, played against, and challenged the preconceptions readers would have about any given novel. They see one they think they’ll enjoy, they pick it up, they open it, and they expect something. Joyce gave them something else, and he did so with a title that was guaranteed to give them even further expectations. Ulysses is named for the hero of The Odyssey, after all…a character who may well hold the title for being the most adventuresome protagonist ever set to page.

Joyce’s Ulysses, then, is about a man who wakes up, eats breakfast, goes to work, eyeballs some women, and wanders around until bedtime.

He knew your expectations. He just knew he’d get bored meeting them.

What Joyce does is forcibly enlarge our understanding of what narrative is. By mapping the mundane wanderings of his own protagonist, Leopold Bloom, to the relentless action and cunning violence of Ulysses (or Odysseus), Joyce tacitly argues that the real excitement is within. It’s in the mind of an unremarkable man. It’s in how we process the world. It’s in our thoughts and hesitations and self-doubt. That’s what he finds interesting, and, he suggests, it’s what we should find interesting, too.

Ulysses has a reputation for being (at least) a bit too difficult. I can’t say that I agree…at least not entirely. Perhaps I just had a really great professor teach it to me. (Scratch that “perhaps.”) There are difficult passages, of course, and there are stretches of the novel that to this day I find impenetrable. But that may be by design. Shouldn’t the thoughts of another human being be at least intermittently unintelligible? We understand our thoughts, but would we understand someone else’s? Should we? Isn’t it privilege enough to peer into another man’s mind and understand even just the broad strokes?

It’s an odd novel, and one I will always love. It’s beautiful in its ugliness. It’s inviting, and it keeps you at a solid intellectual distance. It’s challenging and benign. It’s the simplest story imaginable told in the most complicated possible way.

And it’s incredible. It’s one of those books I feel that everybody should read at least once. Even if you hate it, which you might. Even if you don’t understand it, which is a very real possibility. Even if you come away feeling like you wasted your time. I’ll disagree with you endlessly on that last one, but it’s a novel that helps you to understand what a novel is. It’s a book that teaches you how to read. And, strangely, it’s a book that filters Joyce’s experiences through a fictional character and again through a classical filter and again through your own mind as a reader. It’s a chain of intellectual reasoning that can actually teach you one hell of a lot about the way your brain works.

You have to admit, that’s a pretty great trick.

There’s some literary group on Facebook of which I’m a member. I don’t remember joining it. Maybe somebody else added me. I’m pretty sure I’ve never even commented on anything there.

But, fairly recently, somebody posted a picture of this book and asked if anyone had read it. I wasn’t surprised that many of the commenters had; it’s a literary group, after all, and Ulysses is one of the most famous novels. I was surprised, though, at how many people told this reader not to bother.

They said they started it, and gave up a few chapters in.

They said it was confusing, and that other, easier books would be more deserving of their time.

That was heartbreaking to me. Literature should be a challenge. Readers should be willing to fight, to push through, to be enriched by the experience.

That’s what an adventure is, isn’t it?

What’s an odyssey that isn’t difficult?

To whom could that possibly have any value?

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year.

Title: The Boy Detective Fails
Author: Joe Meno
Year: 2006

Life hurts.

It’s cruel. It’s painful. It knows every weakness you have and it digs right into them. It’s unfair, and at times feels malicious.

It’s probably even worse for those who peak early. While the rest of us learn gradually, day after day, just how difficult the world can be, some people must face it all at once…the rudest of all possible awakenings…after being led to believe that they were different. That they’d be loved and celebrated forever. Or, at the very least, that they’d be okay.

Child celebrities are our most enduring examples of this. They learn that the world is one thing, but, gradually, the money disappears. They lose their youthful cuteness. The more mature, more complex roles don’t come. They were born into one world, and, all at once, they wake up in another. One in which they aren’t adored, but laughed at. Mocked. Framed as cautionary tales.

Some of them adjust. Many of them don’t.

Every child is willing to believe he is extraordinary. Celebrities, however, actually have hundreds or thousands or millions of people sustaining that illusion for them. Making it feel real. Making it feel permanent.

Then the bottom falls out.

And some of them just keep falling.

The Boy Detective Fails is about an extraordinary youth who isn’t a youth anymore. Billy Argo was a naturally gifted child who never learned how to be an adult. And he grows up, as we all must, to find that he’s unprepared for the world of employment, of romance, of…well…responsibility.

It’s a very funny book, and it’s also deeply, bracingly sad.

As children, Billy, his sister Caroline, and their best friend Fenton solved crimes. They banded together, the little scamps, to piece together the clues that the police missed. They used their intuition, their particular skills, their friendship to make the world a safer, cleaner, better place…one moustache-twirling criminal at a time.

But it couldn’t, and didn’t, last forever. Fenton fell into a deep, unhealthy depression. Caroline, despondent, took her own life. And Billy…

Billy doesn’t know what to do.

And that’s The Boy Detective Fails. It’s the story of a man too smart for his own good that doesn’t know what to do. It’s the story of a genius learning, for the first time, the things you and I forgot long ago. It’s the story of someone who spent his entire childhood being told who he was, and now has to discover the real answer for himself.

There’s a deep, affecting, heart-breaking sweetness to that, and the book handles it brilliantly, striking an absolutely razor-perfect balance between the comedy and the pathos. It’s tricky, and the story threatens to pull author Joe Meno too far in either direction. He never lets it.

Our familiarity with fallen child stars–or at least those who peaked early, and were unprepared for what the world actually was–has led to a number of riffs on the idea, pairing this concept with certain exceptional, fictional character types. The two fit together very naturally.

The Venture Bros., for instance, uses boy adventurers. Watchmen used superheroes. The Boy Detective Fails uses, of course, young detectives…most specifically Encyclopedia Brown, whose shadow deliberately resembles the one cast by poor, lost Billy Argo.

We use fictional characters to better understand our actual lives. By putting ourselves in the heads of characters, get to see the world from another perspective. Which is what makes things like Watchmen, The Venture Bros., and this book so interesting: we step outside of our heads once, and then we take a step further. We identify with one aspect of these exceptional characters, and then are forced to come to terms with another.

The Boy Detective Fails is deceptively complex. It’s not a difficult read at all, but Billy’s adjustment from celebrated child to tormented adult is a fascinating one, and Joe Meno leaves enough of his threads unconnected–artfully so–that only rarely will two readers come away with the same understanding of Billy’s situation. It has its clear ups and downs, but it also has its important ambiguities.

Billy does find love. Kind of.

Billy does find friendship. Kind of.

Billy does make peace with his old, scheming nemesis.

Kind of.

There are no easy answers, and, debateably, there’s not even a definitive ending. I’ve read it several times and I’m still not sure if one specific final gesture of Billy’s is reassuring, or darkly comic. I understand his intention, don’t get me wrong…but I’m not convinced I fully understand Meno’s.

And I like that.

The Boy Detective Fails is a mystery in itself. Not the mystery it claims to be, exactly. No…it’s more a puzzle of existence. It’s more a questioning of why any of us are here…and what responsibility we have to our own reputations, to the people around us…to those we affect without even realizing it.

It takes a lot for me to refer to something as “a great novel.” There are many good ones. Many important ones. Many worth reading. Many I’d recommend.

But I don’t know how many great ones I can really identify, without any kind of qualification or second thought.

And yet, as simple as it is, as silly as it is, as well-trod its subject matter, I do think The Boy Detective Fails is a great novel. It cuts in a wholly unique way to the truth of what it means to be alive, here, on this planet. It relishes the ridiculousness of the human condition, and while it doesn’t–and shouldn’t–offer much advice for how to transcend this, it does offer a bit of companionship along the way.

Which is probably the most important thing any of us can offer to anyone else. We’re all here. We’re all being dragged, slowly, toward the end.

Life hurts. It’s cruel. It’s painful.

But, you know what? You don’t have to go through it alone. And as difficult as the journey might be, as inevitable the sadness of its end, as painful as it is to know that the people you love are suffering, too…well…you might still find some small moment of redemption along the way.

Whether or not that justifies anything is up to you.

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year.

Title: Point Omega
Author: Don DeLillo
Year: 2010

I don’t love Don DeLillo. I keep reading his books and I’ll eventually read them all, but I’m not entirely sure why. He’s a strong writer and he’s clearly gifted, but either he has a bit of trouble getting all the gears to turn or I have a bit of trouble staying interested.

Examples? Sure. Underworld was a great concept and a daring undertaking that, ultimately, resulted in a novel that was just overlong for the limited number of things it had to say. It was an elaborately constructed, complex text that…didn’t work.

I could see what was invested in it. It was an impressive machine. But, somewhere inside, something wasn’t working. I stayed interested, but I didn’t care. I read on because there was no real reason to stop, rather than because I had a good reason to keep going. I know that many others disagree; critics loved Underworld. For me, though, the most memorable parts were its fantastic opening (a legendary, real-life baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers) and a recipe for Jell-O chicken mousse embedded later in the text.

Underworld certainly seems like it should be a great novel…but, reading it, I was only ever happy when it rose to being “very good.” I think DeLillo wanted it to be his masterpiece, but couldn’t figure out how to get it there. He released it anyway. I guess you might as well, at that point.

Then there’s Falling Man, his novel of 9/11, which I genuinely remember nothing about at all, aside from the image of a rolling water bottle. For a novel about a massive, recent historical event, and one that occurred quite near to me and changed the way my world actually looked, let alone felt, that’s saying something. Falling Man might not have been bad, but it certainly wasn’t interesting.

But I keep reading DeLillo, and I will keep reading DeLillo.

The reason is White Noise. That’s his real masterpiece. A brilliantly witty, clever, powerful examination of mankind’s response to its own mortality. It’s hilarious and horrifying in approximately equal measures, with a strong character and an impressively rendered family–one flawed, as families are, but ultimately loving, even if they lack the words to express themselves.

It taps into a lot of interesting ideas along the way, as the protagonist learns that due to exposure to an “airborne toxic event”–a carefully euphemized chemical disaster–he is going to die.

When? It’s unknown. How? It’s unknown. Symptoms? Unknown.

In short…nothing has really changed. We’re all going to die. But there’s a difference between knowing it, and finding it out. Having to face the mystery. Bringing it to the fore.

No, you never knew. You still don’t know. It’s just that now, you have to think about it.

DeLillo found an interesting aspect of human life, a shared and universal and important aspect of human life, to use as the foundation for what was already bound to be a great novel. It was sharp, effective, and insightful. What’s more, it felt as though it came naturally…the way all the best novels do. That’s something I can’t say about anything else I’ve read of his, and I truly believe that that’s the defining difference.

But when I tried to pick a DeLillo book to spotlight, White Noise wasn’t doing it for me. I’m not sure why. It’s great, and I’d have a lot to say about it, but it didn’t feel right. So I left a spot on my list for it, sat down to write about it, and thought about Point Omega instead.

Point Omega, I’m pretty sure, isn’t even good. It’s barely 100 pages long and it still feels padded. It’s less like a brief novel than it is a tragically overlong short story. DeLillo is talented enough to do remarkable things with unremarkable material, but at times it doesn’t even feel like he’s trying.

At other times, though, Point Omega feels like it could have given rise to something much more interesting than it really is.

It’s such a short and uneventful novel that to mention anything about it would pretty much count as a spoiler. So, you’ve been warned.

The bulk of the book is dedicated to Jim Finley, a filmmaker. He seeks out, and finds, an elderly, retired war advisor named Richard Elster who spends his time in a small home in the desert. Finley has an idea for a film about Elster. Sort of. It’s a film in which Elster stands in front of a wall and speaks. And that’s it.

We can argue all night long about whether or not such a film could possibly have artistic value (my answer: it could, of course, but it wouldn’t have automatic artistic value), but I can say at least that the novel doesn’t quite know what to do with it. The making of what sounds like a fairly boring film turns out to be a fairly boring story. Finley and Elster are two isolates who make vague conversation and while away the days. It’s exactly as exciting to read as you might expect.

Bookending this sequence are two shorter sections taking place at the (real) 24 Hour Psycho art installation, in which Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film is screened at a much slower speed so that it takes an entire day to watch it. A character obsesses over this installation, and eventually meets a girl there.

The girl is Jessie, Elster’s daughter. She joins her father and Finley in the desert about halfway through the book, and Finley takes what is strongly implied to be an unhealthy interest in her. She notices this, and disappears before he’s able to act on a terrible impulse.

And that’s it.

We don’t know where she went, or how much she knew about Finley’s intentions toward her. We get suggestions of each, but no definitive answer, which is a good thing, because it’s here–only here, and for far too brief a period–that the book becomes interesting.

Jessie is gone. Finley and Elster search the desert for her. They are unprepared for the environment. They find what might be a clue, and what might be nothing.

Eventually, as they must, they stop looking.

Jessie is gone, and the two are left alone in their clear hopelessness.

It’s a haunting book, if only because it contains the ghost of something so much better. At times it feels like a rough outline that periodically stumbles across interesting ideas, which you’d think would be explored more thoroughly in a later draft.

But we never get there. Like Finley’s movie, I guess, it never really comes to anything. Unfortunately, also like Finley’s movie, it never really had a sense of what it was about anyway.

There’s artistic possibility in the hollow stasis Finley and Elster build up together, which is then upset permanently by the arrival and disappearance of Elster’s daughter…

…but it never goes further than being a possibility.

The best version of Point Omega is what happens your mind for the months and years after you’ve read it, in which the story is reconfigured into something more gripping, more interesting, more powerful. The book, as it stands, gets you started.

But, as is too often the case with DeLillo, the reader has to meet him more than halfway.

If it weren’t for White Noise, I don’t know that I’d keep making the journey.

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year.

Title: The Postman Always Rings Twice
Author: James M. Cain
Year: 1934

When I think about The Postman Always Rings Twice, one word comes to mind: bleak.

That’s for good reason, and it’s therefore somewhat remarkable that I enjoy the novel as much as I do.

I’m not really sure why that is. “Bleak” and I don’t get along all that well, at least not when it comes to literature. I’m much more forgiving of it in passive media, such as film and music. I can even (usually) handle it in video games, where it’s often something of a selling point.

In novels, though, it’s a bit different. Novels engage the mind in a completely unique way. The work of translation, of visualization, of narrative identification, all takes place within the mind. Novels tap directly into your center of empathy. Your brain decodes them in a way that only your brain can, and, if the writing is effective, it can make you, as a reader, feel things more potently than even real life can.

That’s why “bleak” is difficult to process as a reader. It’s why I skip many books. However well they’re written, however impressive or clever their narratives, however memorable a bleak novel might be…is it really worth putting your mind through that? Transporting it to and forcing it to endure a small universe of relentless, tormenting darkness? I’m not even speaking about horror; horror can operate at a remove, wherein there’s a certain thrill to the gore and the violence. No…I’m speaking expressly about bleakness. Pure, potent bleakness that surrounds, envelops, weighs upon the reader.

Horror can be fun. Bleakness doesn’t allow even that much.

I remember Last Exit to Brooklyn feeling very bleak. In fact, it took me two attempts to even finish it. I remember Push being so bleak I couldn’t finish it. The same applies to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; however much I enjoy Murakami, I made it a bit more than halfway through that book and simply couldn’t keep reading. It filled me with such despair that I couldn’t operate.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is a different kind of bleak than those novels, but I wouldn’t say that it’s any less bleak.

It’s relentless. It’s tragic. Neither of its two main characters (and co-conspirators) have any redeeming characteristics…unless you count good looks, which, the novel makes clear, you emphatically should not.

It’s the story of Frank Chambers, a conman who identifies an easy mark in a Greek restaurateur who was dumb enough to reach out to what seemed like a man in need. Frank picks up on a familiar capacity for selfishness and mischief on the part of the Greek’s glamorous wife Cora, and before long they scheme to murder the man for his insurance money.

They carry out their plan.

It fails, and they have every opportunity to reconsider their choice.

Needless to say, they do not. They carry out a second plan, and it succeeds. Without the Greek left to betray, they soon turn on each other.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is structured something like a tragic romance. Frank and Cora are forbidden from love, and so they topple the obstacles, one by one, that stand between them. The only problem is that they’re awful human beings, rotten to the bone, and, ultimately, they don’t like each other any more than they like anyone else. Which is part of what makes the novel so bleak; there’s no hope for a happy ending, because neither of the main characters wants a happy ending. They delight in being irredeemable. That’s who they are. And though they’d never admit or recognize that fact, that’s the only way they’re comfortable.

The one character in the novel who seems to at least have the capacity for good is their victim, several times over. Frank and Cora aren’t forces of evil; they’re forces of bleakness.

I first experienced the story in the largely faithful (the only time The Postman Always Rings Twice and faithfulness can go together) 1946 film version, starring John Garfield and Lana Turner. I remember being impressed with how bleak and daringly unromantic it was, but it’s got nothing on the source material.

As an author, James M. Cain wasn’t subject to the same necessary censorship that Tay Garnett was as a director. And I will say right now that Garnett got away with much more than you might have expected in mid-40s Hollywood. But Cain can go further, and he does. And it’s not just that he can present more of the sex and violence…it’s the way in which he presents them. The way in which it isn’t glorified at all. The way in which it’s described so bluntly that it’s impossible to be seduced by it.

Frank and Cora have a lot of sex. They use almost every free moment to have sex. We’re privy to a lot of it…and yet, it’s not a turn on. It’s abusive. It’s a coupling free of love, romance, or even respect. It’s often bloody. It’s always cruel. Each time these two characters come together, we’re reminded of how important it should be to keep them apart. They are awful to each other, and they relish their awfulness.

It’s not two characters who are in mutual agreement about rough sex. It’s two characters who want to hurt each other, and who are only happy when they push each other too far, beyond their realm of comfort, beyond even the basic decency of treatment they should be able to expect as human beings.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is a sad story of inhuman, remorseless ugliness. It’s a tale that’s not only without a hero; it’s a tale that doesn’t deserve one.

And yet…I can read it. It’s bleak, but it’s a bleak I can go along with. Cain is effective at defining these characters as deeply monstrous, but he also–perhaps even by focusing in so tightly on that monstrousness–somehow reminds us there is good in the world.

Just not here.

The Postman Always Rings Twice thrusts us into a vacuum of hopelessness, but it defines it so well that we know that, beyond the boundaries, something good is happening. Somewhere.

Frank and Cora entangle one another in their own self-perpetuating miseries, and that’s where the entirety of the novel takes place.

Any other household in the world is bound to be better than this. And that, in its own bleak way, is the novel’s ultimate reassurance.

Choose Your Own Advent is a yuletide celebration of literacy. We’ll spotlight a different novel every day until Christmas, hopefully helping you find one you’d like to read in the new year.

Title: The Catcher in the Rye
Author: J.D. Salinger
Year: 1951

The Catcher in the Rye is a deceptively complex novel. It’s far less a story than it is a collection of related vignettes that weave a longform character sketch of Holden Caulfield, literature’s most prominent troubled youth. It’s a picaresque that doesn’t cover much geographical space, but charts–with disarming effectiveness–the worried expanse of the adolescent mind.

It’s one of my favorites. I’ve read it more times than I can count. Often around the holidays. When we’re supposed to be happy.

It works pretty well around then.

It’s a great novel, and also one against which there’s been some critical backlash. We read it at some point, sure, and thought it was brilliant and wise and profound, but we’ve grown up since then…and Holden, pointedly, has not. That’s not only because he’s a character in an unchanging novel; it’s because he’s unchanging my design. He’s stunted in his development, willingly and stubbornly so.

When many of us first read it–it’s commonly assigned in high school, after all–we were like that. We knew better than so many others. We felt things nobody else felt. We were the ones pushing back against the profane soullessness of the adult world, and we were right to do so…because we could change things if only we wouldn’t compromise, if only we’d hold on to what we had, if only we believed we could do so much…

And then we graduated.

We went to college.

We got jobs. We got married.

We had children, we bought homes. We joined rotary clubs.

The Catcher in the Rye was just a novel. Maybe we had a copy on our shelves. More likely, we did not. We’d look back, if we ever looked back, and see Holden as a silly, frustrating child. Perhaps we’d be embarrassed that we ever identified with him.

After all…he needed to grow up.

In fact, I’ve had friends of mine–readers I respect–share more or less precisely that opinion with me, without the biographical details. Holden Caulfield himself doesn’t represent to them the follies of youth…their identification with Holden Caulfield was itself the folly.

And I think that’s missing the point.

It’s easy to fall into the trap–especially when young, impressionable, lonesome, adrift–of glorifying Holden’s outlook, and finding little in the book beyond loose identification with its protagonist. But as we grow up–as we learn to read literature better, and more completely–we should find a lot more. Holden’s flaws should become more apparent. And what we once celebrated as youthful rebellion should reveal itself to be a kind of steadfast blockheadedness coupled with at least some degree of mental illness.

But there is wisdom in Holden Caulfield. A kind of wisdom, anyway. A willingness to yearn for a world he’s never actually known, a desire to see innocence preserved, a warped sort of respectfulness that he often feels even when he fails to demonstrate it…

…and that’s the moral. The fact that this flawed, embarrassing, self-sabotaging young man still has something to say. Still has something to offer. Still represents so much of the good that is–or could be–in the world. Holden Caulfield is a deeply flawed human being…but he’s still human. And I think that’s what makes the book difficult for so many readers who’ve “grown up”; they see more of the world in black and white. Their experiences have taught them to file people away more easily. They’re less willing to engage with flawed individuals than they were as children, as teenagers, as young adults.

Than they were before they got hurt for doing so.

And so Holden Caulfield, to them, is the old friend they’re glad they lost touch with. The one who never changed. The one who is still haunting the same places, still complaining about the same things, still alone. Still struggling with the same problems. Still where he’ll always be.

The Catcher in the Rye reminds us, with its own refusal to age, that at one point we did hang around with Holden. We loved him. We were forgiving of him in a way we are not today. We are the ones who have changed, and that may or may not be for the better.

We might be further ahead. We might have left the protagonist of some novel we used to love behind. But at what cost? Do we rob ourselves of the fond memories we once shared with him? Do we dismiss the next Holden Caulfield we meet?

Didn’t he have some kind of point? Didn’t he just want the world to be a little…better?

The Catcher in the Rye is designed to help close readers question themselves, and their outlooks. It never wanted to hold up Holden Caulfield as some exemplary human being worthy of specific idolization. It wanted to craft a believably flawed person and catch him at a painfully transitional time in his life. It wanted to capture in words everything struggling young people could only dream of being able to articulate. It wanted to speak for those who may not have been convinced they’d ever find their voice.

And it succeeded. The Catcher in the Rye was, and continues to be, a massively successful book. It’s still changing lives. It’s still helping young readers to understand what it means to be alive in a world that probably isn’t what they wished it would be. It’s still helping people to find their place.

It’s just a shame that many readers eventually feel that they’ve outgrown it, and are reluctant to engage with it differently as adults.

Trying to read it again in your thirties, your forties, your fifties, and being ashamed of what once resonated with your distant, youthful self…well, that means you’re reading it wrong.

You should be looking instead for the different lesson it would like to teach you as an adult. You should be learning about what we lose as we grow up, and the danger of leaving the wrong things behind.