ENGLISH: The Death of JD Salinger is Worse than Puberty

There are certain things that, as a matter of course, every pubescent individual MUST do. Wear hideous clothes due to too-close attention to trends and a budget - and taste level - that induces you to shop at Claire's boutiques, for example. Or buy a Tiger Beat magazine to obsess over heartthrobs that will later come out of the closet. Or form a family-singing group because you actually think that is somehow cool, and that you're gonna "make it" as a modern day Partridge family, except singing Amy Grant covers (okay, maybe that last one was just me).

Amongst the most indisputable rites of pubescent passage, though, is the reading of, and total identification with, The Catcher in the Rye. As it turned out, I was something of a misfit, an outsider. But I have no doubt that half the cheerleading squad, the girl who was THE hottie up through grade 9 since she got boobs way earlier than anyone else, and even Steve Julius himself picked up that book, read it, and said "I feel exactly the same way."

Teen angst is a universal, and no book taps into it more adroitly. And yet it transcends that much-belabored topic. I've read hundreds of books about outsiders, but I'm still looking for my Holden Caufield today - to save, to marry, to be way cooler than everyone else with; who knows which.

Perhaps all the attention for creating the archetypal misunderstood loner caused Salinger to conflate himself with his character; the only thing he was as well known for as Catcher was his extreme reclusiveness (though if you haven't already, pick up Nine Stories - he wasn't a one-trick pony). He's one of those people that periodically you might have to check online to see if he had, in fact, died since last you looked - he was deliberately so far outside the spotlight that in many ways he was already half-a-shade well before today.

Nonetheless, it's sad to think that he's really gone. Even as a 20-something who has long been mostly over the whole "I'm so misunderstood" phase of her career, it was heartening to think that Salinger was out there somewhere; as long as he was, there was a good chance that someone, somewhere, really "got" me.

They don't make literary giants like they used to. Rest in peace, JD Salinger.

-Posted by Jilly