What I learned from Holden Caulfield, whom I got to know in Mrs. Levinson’s 11th-grade English class (where Jane sat a few seats behind me, by the way)….

As a reader:

• An honest-to-goodness unreliable narrator is my favorite kind of narrator. Because, after all, isn’t every narrator unreliable when you get right down to it?  The ones you have to watch out for are the ones that actually believe themselves to be trustworthy and 100% sane.
• An alienated protagonist requires a little work to understand.  If the novelist is doing his or her job right, you’ll feel richly rewarded at the end for going tot he trouble.  If not, you just feel vaguely annoyed and frustrated.  I’ve always been glad for the chance to get to know strange, lonely, outraged, damaged, noble Holden.
• First-person stream of consciousness is both seductive and jarring.  A strange mix of whole-hearted identification, and the sheer strangeness of being inside another mind as it relentlessly churns away.
• The archetypal heroic quest can belong to a modern-day, socially alienated teenager every bit as much as it belongs to Odysseus or Sir Gawain.  Nobility andworthiness take many forms.
• Reading about Holden’s rite of passage was oneof my own rites of passage.  True for me, true for most of my friends—and now for my children.  How rich and wonderful.
• Sometimes the books that get banned are the ones containing the greatest sense of the holy.

As a person:

• Innocence and childhood are fragile, precious, and worth protecting. 
• People in positions of authority will let you down.  Often.  Get on with your own quest as best you can after meeting up with knuckle-headed gatekeepers.
• Alienation can be greatest for those whose ideals are loftiest.
• Phoniness can be looked at as a kind of moral assault.
• Irony is a useful tool for dealing with agonizing absurdities.
• Profanity can, paradoxically, be a way of expressing appreciation for the sacred.
• Adolescence is a grand, grueling, and perilous journey.

Written in memory of J.D. Salinger,  1919-2010