The last time I'd read Catcher, I was a teenager. My big brother the novelist gave me the book like a final exam that I'd better pass if I was a brother of his. All I could appreciate at the time was Holden hated phonies and was "oppressed" accordingly. I hoped that was sufficient to keep my brother who I worshiped then, like Phoebe did Holden.

Reading it now is a completely different experience. I can see all the Salingerness in it. I notice that Holden even contemplates running away to a cabin in the woods. They send him to schools to prepare him for the real world but he resists them. Not for lack of ability, but for inner purity.

The big values in Catcher, and all of Salinger, really, are innocence and observation. Innocence allows you to see the falsity of the adult world. Observation permits you to see what everyone else is ignoring. These are super powers. The real world is built of kryptonite.

We can hate phonies along with Holden, forgetting for the brief time we read that we are the phonies. Oh, not really, we say--it's just that we have to live in the real world, right? Inside, we're still pure, we tell ourselves and by appreciating the book, we prove it to ourselves. Fact is, a phony has lost the ability to see their own phoniness. No one caught them in the rye and it's too late for them now. Them, not us, right? It's not too late for us because we can read Salinger.