Word: caulfield
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...summer of 1951, a modest 277-page book was published. Its author: the little-known short-story writer J.D. Salinger. Its narrator: Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old whose picaresque journey took him from Pencey Prep (the third private school from which he had been dismissed) to his home in New York City three days later. The Catcher in the Rye became a prodigious bestseller, transfiguring the emotional landscape, the mores and insights of an entire generation. It gave Salinger an abrupt prominence throughout America, Europe. Asia and Africa, and triggered what Critic George Steiner resentfully labeled "the Salinger industry...
...wave in a storm, a dancer's leap never turn out to be as high as we had hoped." The tide has gone out; the factories of the Salinger industry have experienced vast layoffs; the author himself has not communicated with his readers for seven years. And Holden Caulfield-has his voice been muted by his creator's silence? What happens to a prodigy two decades after his debut, when he is pushing 40? An admirer can only hazard a guess...
...some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer." I chose all three. I hated jocks, grimaced at grocery stores with signs selling APPLE'S, and I threw paper clips at stenographers. Then I threw myself. The old Caulfield Charm. I couldn't believe what was happening to me. But then I could never believe what happened to me-in life...
...with The Catcher in the Rye are inevitable, simply because all novels about youth in flight are still measured against Salinger's. But what such a weighing shows is chiefly that Yglesias' tone-far more detached than Salinger's-is completely his own and that Holden Caulfield would now be pushing 40. Salinger's novel is a wholly mature work. Yglesias is still capable of childish sentences. But his is a superior novel, without regard to the age of its author. In the end, when Raul has dropped out of school for good, it is hard...
WHERE HAS TOMMY FLOWERS GONE? Tommy is a sort of Holden Caulfield at 30, an asphalt urchin who is tart, smart and often touching...