The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

The main thing in this book is the voice. The teenager Holden Caulfield, expelled from yet another school, wanders around New York for several days and tells about it in a way that no one had spoken in literature before 1951: with interruptions, repetitions, the eternal 'in general' and hatred for any pretense. There is almost no plot — meetings, conversations, attempts to make a phone call, attempts not to return home. But from this chatter gradually emerges what the hero is silent about: he is not a rebel, he is a person in grief, and all his anger at the falsehood of adults is a way not to talk about his own loss. Salinger made the teenage intonation a literary fact, and after him, the coming-of-age novel began to be written differently. The book has long lived a double life: it is loved and banned, it is confessed to in loyalty at sixteen and embarrassed about at forty — which is very much in the spirit of Holden.

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