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| Confusion in the Rye |
| Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi May 26, 2009, 00:28 IST |
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Call him Holden. The protagonist of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye may be thinly veiled as “Mr C”, but as the title and the blurb make clear, this book is intended as a sequel to J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.
Salinger has become perhaps the second most famous literary recluse of the 21st century—Thomas Pynchon, the first, is notable for threatening to shoot intruders on his privacy. In 1974, Salinger gave a rare formal interview, much quoted since: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
Since then, visitors to Cornish have ascertained that Salinger eats in the kitchens of restaurants to avoid strangers; that he likes turkey breast sandwiches; that there may, or may not, be several unpublished but complete manuscripts nestling in his home; and that very little of any of this is relevant to our understanding of Salinger. Salinger and his lawyers have ferociously guarded his literary privacy, forcing would-be biographers to remove quotes from the author.
So the existence of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye raised eyebrows—would the author and his legal team allow an unauthorised sequel to his most famous book?
The thing is, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye smells like a phony, right from the dedication to Mr Salinger: “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life”. People never notice anything, as Holden said, but create a publishing house called Windupbird Publishing and a Swedish-American author called John David California, and they might just ask questions. Windupbird Publishing appears to have only this one book on its list, and the nod to Murakami in its name aside, there’s the blatant suggestion that we’re all being, well, wound up.
Salinger’s first names are Jerome David, and while it is within the realms of possibility that a former gravedigger and Ironman triathlete might pen a tribute to Catcher in the Rye, it stretches the bounds of credibility. Especially when the Wikipaedia note on John David California adds that his birthday is April 1. There are so many phonies piling up in this picture that the only thing missing is a literary agent called Mr Bananafish.
You’re left with four scenarios: 1) this is a hoax by an author who thinks the publicity will be worth the legal hassle; 2) this is a hoax undertaken with Salinger’s blessing, as an act of whimsy; 3) Coming Through the Rye is really written by Salinger himself, who’s trying to maintain his privacy by pulling a hoax; 4) John David California really does exist and was a gravedigger with a literary bent, like his predecessors in Hamlet.
What makes this story more than an “Oddly Enough” footnote is the nature of the sequel itself. Mr C is now 76 years old, incarcerated in a retirement home instead of Holden’s prep school, which he abandons in order to rediscover New York. “I open my eyes, and just like that, I’m awake,” starts the first line. “I suppose it’s pretty damn early, but it must still be the middle of the night. It’s so dark I can hardly see my goddamned hand in front of my face.” Predictably, there’s a character in the book just like Salinger, who makes suitably authorial pronouncements from time to time.
If this is a hoax authored by the 90-year-old Salinger himself, all will be forgiven. What if it’s not, though? What if John David California exists, in some form? Copyright prevents one author from lifting another author’s character—that would be considered literary robbery, and can only be done with safely dead authors. Renaming a character may not be enough.
But while characters, and even plots, can be protected, style cannot be copyrighted—and this is what will make or mar Coming Through the Rye. If it’s a badly crafted sequel, an awkward literary gesture of respect, no one will mourn its death. Just suppose it’s good, though, and it’s what you would cherish as a Catcher fan, if it takes Holden Caulfield’s story further than Salinger did. (In subsequent short stories, Salinger hinted that Holden had gone missing during World War Two, but said no more about his fate.)
As Holden said in Catcher, “What really knocks me out is a book, when you’re all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Not that J D Salinger will be taking phone calls any time soon, but if Coming Through the Rye were really that kind of book, would you really care who wrote it and if it was the biggest hoax in the world?
Email: nilanjanasroy@gmail.com
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