J.D. Salinger’s lawyers seek to keep so-called sequel off shelves

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Lawyers representing J.D. Salinger filed suit in federal court in New York on Monday seeking to force a recall of the book ‘60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,’ which the suit calls a ‘copycat book.’ The book, from a very small publisher called Windupbird Publishing, was widely reported to be a sequel to Salinger’s iconic 1951 book, ‘Catcher in the Rye.’

The book is dedicated to J.D. Salinger, and in mid-May, author J.D California told the Guardian, ‘Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he’s not at a prep school, he’s at a retirement home in upstate New York.’ He continued:

It’s pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past. He’s still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he’s disappointed in the goddamn world. He’s older and wiser in a sense, but in another sense he doesn’t have all the answers.

But a few weeks later he’d changed his story. In an interview published in the Telegraph on May 30, California said:

The stories are so different that I don’t think you can argue this is a sequel. This is such an American response. It’s just words. I have written about Mr C, a 76-year-old man. Salinger wrote a book about a a 16-year-biy [sic] named Holden Caulfield. It’s a story about growing old and old age and finding yourself in the world.

While Salinger has every right to take his own legacy seriously, one has to wonder how seriously J.D. California and his publisher are taking themselves. He really is J.D. — short for John David — but California is a name he (legally) adopted. His birthday, he says, is April Fool’s Day, 1976.

And Windupbird Publishing has so little track record that the AP describes it as ‘an obscure company allegedly based in London.’ Its parent, Nicotext, is a small publisher with no literary titles to its credit, instead focusing on books like ‘The Macho Man’s Bad Joke Book,’ ‘Stand Up: The World’s Funniest Quotes’ and ‘Bla Bla Sex: 600 Incredibly Useless Facts About SEX.’

A follow-up to ‘Catcher in the Rye’ is a terrible idea — Holden Caulfield is perfect as an eternal adolescent. And his 1951-style adolescent sensibilities were a little more interesting than today’s.

— Carolyn Kellogg