638 The American Century: Literature since 1945his life make clear, he is not entirely sure what the truth about himself and his world
is. This is all to say that the power of The Catcher in the Rye is also its problem.
Holden is telling us his story from a sanatorium: which is not perhaps a cause for
concern – about the veracity of what he says, that is – since, as many American books
show us, much madness can be divinest sense. But he does also lie: he confesses to us
that, often, he can spin yarns, inflate facts, and be economical with the truth. In
short, he tells us that he is an unreliable narrator. So the novel moves on to slippery
ground. How are we to see Holden? As authentic American rebel? As a troubled
adolescent? As the only person close to sanity in an insane world? Or the reverse?
There is no real way of knowing, of being certain. That slipperiness, though, is in
turn part of its attraction, and its modernity. The Catcher in the Rye draws us into a
sometimes painfully close relationship with a narrator who is simultaneously
confessional and defensive, longing to reveal himself but fearful of dropping the
mask – and not perhaps sure what that self is. So, we feel, we know Holden and we
do not know him: he is an intimate and a mystery. This is the American rebel
transplanted into a new, shifting, and distinctly modern landscape.
After The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger produced several collections of stories (Nine
Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and
Seymour: An Introduction (1963)). Many of them concern the Glass family and, in
particular, the lonely, brilliant eccentric individualists Franny, Zooey, Seymour, and
Buddy Glass. In the early 1960s, however, Salinger retired to his rural home, withdrew
from the literary scene, and stopped publishing his work. Richard Brautigan did not
withdraw in this way but, before committing suicide in 1984, he gradually slipped
from public view. Although he continued publishing into the early 1980s, his most
successful work had appeared a decade or so earlier: A Confederate General from
Big Sur (1964), Trout Fishing in America (1963), In Watermelon Sugar (1968), and
The Abortion: An Historical Romance (1971). Trout Fishing in America is characteristic.
It describes the search of the narrator for a morning of good fishing in a crystal-clear
stream. His search takes him through a variety of American landscapes: city parks in
San Francisco, forests in Oregon, a Filipino laundry, a wrecking yard that sells used
trout streams by the foot. Surreal and anarchic, whimsical and nostalgic, the narrative
is at once a critique of a culture that has betrayed its early promise – where the
dream of trout fishing has become a purchaseable commodity, a matter of exchange –
and a celebration of continuing possibility, the defiant, anarchic, unbowed spirit of
the individual. “I ended up by being my own trout,” the narrator tells us, which is a
typically quirky way of saying what he says elsewhere in a more straightforward
fashion – America is, after all, “only a place in the mind.” This is the book as fictional
play, a typographical game eschewing plot or structure of any ordinary kind, using
surprise and spontaneity to make its central point. The point is a simple, seminal,
and very American one: we can be whatever we want to be, do whatever we want to
do, whatever the destructive element that surrounds us. To that extent, thanks to the
liberating imagination, trout fishing in America is still possible.
A similarly anarchic optimism characterizes the work of Ken Kesey. Born in
Colorado and brought up in Oregon, Kesey worked for a while as a ward attendantGGray_c05.indd 638ray_c 05 .indd 638 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM