Holden Losing His Hold?

We have been keeping track on this page (see here, here, and here) of efforts to publish 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, a takeoff on J.D. Salinger’s best-selling novel, Catcher in the Rye. But as The New York Times observes, Salinger’s teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield, “may have bigger problems than the insults of irreverent parodists and other ‘phonies,’ as Holden would put it.” Writes Jennifer Schuessler:

Even as Mr. Salinger, who is 90 and in ailing health, seeks to keep control of his most famous creation, there are signs that Holden may be losing his grip on the kids.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” published in 1951, is still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers. Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”

The alienated teenager has lost much of his novelty, said Ariel Levenson, an English teacher at the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Holden’s home turf. She added that even the students who liked the book tend to find the language--“phony,” “her hands were lousy with rocks,” the relentless “goddams”--grating and dated.

“Holden Caulfield is supposed to be this paradigmatic teenager we can all relate to, but we don’t really speak this way or talk about these things,” Ms. Levenson said, summarizing a typical response. At the public charter school where she used to teach, she said, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’ ”

The full Times article can be found here.

READ MORE: “Oh, Holden. Life Is Still So Hard for You,”
by John Green.

U.S. Publication of Holden Caulfield-ish Novel Delayed

It seems to me that, even if the American publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by “J.D. California” is delayed forever, the free publicity this book has gotten will sell a lot of copies around the world.

Today, another chapter was added to the ongoing saga. From The New York Times’ blog:

The judge, Deborah A. Batts, said a new book that contains a 76-year-old version of Caulfield cannot be published in the United States for 10 days while she weighs a copyright infringement case filed by lawyers for Mr. Salinger. The lawyers contend that the new book, published in Britain, was too derivative and that Mr. Salinger’s most well-known character was protected by copyright.

Clearly, the story is not over yet. But for one impossibly tiny Swedish publisher the outcome probably doesn’t matter very much: internationally, this windup bird is gonna have wings.

We’ve been covering this story for the last few months. See previous pieces here and here.

Maybe Salinger Didn’t Write the Sequel

Back in the middle of May, we posited that maybe J.D. Salinger himself had a hand in creating the ridiculous-sounding Catcher in the Rye sequel due out next month from an obscure European publisher. Turns out, we were wrong. Not only did the reclusive 90-year-old writer have nothing to do with Sixty Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, according to AP, on Monday he filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan.

While Salinger says he owns the rights to the Holden Caulfield character, full stop, J.D. California, author of the new book in question, maintains his book has nothing to do with Salinger’s original work, despite the derivative title:

Despite the clear parallels, Mr California and his publishers said they were confident that the new book would not encounter legal problems.

“The stories are so different that I don’t think you can argue this is a sequel,” Mr California said. “This is such an American response. It’s just words. I have written about Mr C, a 76-year-old man. Salinger wrote a book about a a 16-year-boy named Holden Caulfield. It’s a story about growing old and old age and finding yourself in the world.”

Catcher in the Rye Sequel Probably a Hoax

Will this be what finally wrenches notoriously reclusive author J.D. Salinger from the comfy nest he’s been hiding out in for more than 50 years? Or was the book penned by Salinger in a lame disguise? Both are possible. Time will tell.

From the publisher’s description of Sixty Years Later: Coming Through the Rye:

A 76-year-old man wakes up in a nursing home in upstate New York. This seemingly normal day brings with it an unnerving compulsion to flee his present situation and embark on a curious journey through the streets of New York City. Powerless to resist these strange new urges, Holden Caulfield, like a decrepit marionette, finds himself in the midst of bizarre and occasionally depraved escapades. Is senility finally closing in or is some higher power controlling the chaos? 60 years after his debut as the great American anti-hero, Holden Caulfield is yanked back onto the page without a goddamn clue why.

The sequel will be published in September by a Swedish outfit called Nicotext. (“We make books. More specifically, we make books whose sole purpose it is to make you giggle. While thumbing our collective nose at the literati, we have found our niche amongst the useless, the trivial and the potentially offensive. The books in our catalogue may not reflect our capacity for intellectual athleticism, but they will put a smile on your face, which is our main objective.”)

It’s not by Salinger, but by (ahem) a freelance travel writer, “former gravedigger and Ironman triathlete” (what?) named John David California.

The world press and the blogosphere are abuzz. “The world needs a Catcher in the Rye sequel like it needs an asshole on its elbow,” Richard Lawson said for Gawker earlier today. The Guardian and the Quill and Quire blog offer up just-the-facts as they see them. However, considering author California’s bizarre biography and the fact that a sketchy Wikipedia entry lists his birthday as April 1st, I have a hunch we’ve not heard the last of this story. At all.

Writer in the Rye

Whatever happened to J.D. Salinger? According to Tom Leonard of The Spectator, he’s living in New Hampshire, eating sandwiches, attending the occasional church social and writing, writing, writing:

The recluse’s recluse, Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small rural community of Cornish, in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, for more than 50 years. After writing The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 -- his generation-shaping masterpiece about teenage angst and rebellion -- he published only a few collections of short stories. A short piece of fiction for the New Yorker in 1965 was his last published work. He hasn’t spoken to the media since the early 1950s, breaking his Trappist silence only once in 1974 for a brief phone conversation with a New York Times journalist in which he said there was ‘a marvellous peace in not publishing... I write just for myself and my own pleasure.’ He added: ‘I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.’

Leonard’s piece is interesting, lengthy and here.