Radio Australia Today Editorial

J.D. Salinger. The death of a genius

29 January 2010

Jerome David Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, passed on yesterday at the age of 91.

Catcher in the Rye is an extraordinary book, one of the few where an adult author has successfully written from the perspective of a child. In fact I can think of only two other writers who have done so (David Ireland in Bloodfather and Sonya Hartnett in Of a Boy ).

Catcher in the Rye is a sometimes painful story of a young man walking the streets of New York sometime after the second world war. He is feeling disenfranchised, at a loose end, but also inquisitive. It is a masterstroke of Salinger that he doesn’t tell you the whole story. We know that the boy is supposed to be in school, but we don’t learn much about why he’s walking the streets. Instead we are on the streets with him, in a kind of sidewalk stream-of consciousness.

Some authors only write one great work in their life (such as Harper Lee and her To Kill a Mockingbird) and others will produce ridiculous amounts of masterworks (Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare). Salinger wrote Franny and Zooey which also was successful, but it was for Catcher in the Rye that he will be forever remembered, a book that took us all on a remarkable journey where the mind was more important than the geography.

A loss indeed.

- Phil Kafcaloudes