Book Review : ‘Highlights’--Reharvesting ‘The Catcher in the Rye’

Highlights of the Off-Season by Peter J. Smith (Simon & Schuster: $16.95).

Let’s say the only novel that ever made any sense to you was “The Catcher in the Rye,” which you read in some English class taught by a teacher who practically had to put his job on the line even to get it included; maybe in some real heartland city where the school board would object to the language or insist the time had to be spent on classics, like “The Mill on the Floss.”

Anyhow, you would not only have to read it about 6 million times but give it to virtually everyone you cared about, not just for Christmas and birthdays but the instant you’d decided that person might have some possibilities as a human being. You’d practically have this standing order at the bookstore, so whenever they’d run out they’d automatically get more, just in case you needed one in a hurry. That would go on for about 35 years, during which you’d check out all the reviews to see if J. D. Salinger had published a sequel or written another book altogether.

By then you’d know Salinger lived somewhere in Vermont as a sort of anchorite, never giving interviews or allowing himself to be photographed, but you’d have this fantasy that if you went up there and just hung around in the supermarket, he’d come in for toothpaste.

Anyway, you’d recognize him from the picture on the book jacket and you’d casually pick out the same brand and you’d say something like “great taste,” careful not to sound like one of those toothpaste commercials. But that’s just a fantasy.

No, what I’d really do after a lifetime of waiting for that sequel would be to write it myself. How hard could it be, if you have a reasonably large vocabulary and a sense of humor? J. D. Salinger and I actually have two out of three initials in common, and after you read a book the first 3 million times you start to think in the writer’s style. I’d begin the same perfect way with this prep school kid who’s just been bounced for the second or third time, only I’d put the school in Los Angeles, because that would give it this extra satiric dimension--the whole idea of a prep school in L.A. is funny in itself, because where do you go afterward? To the beach or on to one of those places where they put quail eggs and chevre on the pizza?

I’d also give the narrator a great sister, but maybe I’d make her older instead of younger, because by this time she would be, and I’d probably turn her into some totally Los Angeles person, like a TV star with a house in Malibu, where I’ve actually been for a few terrible hours. If I did that, I could really take off on L.A., which is my idea of the first circle of Dante’s Inferno, though miraculously, my sister wouldn’t be spoiled by fame or anything. I’d make sure my narrator had about four dozen wild adventures in various other parts of the country, so the book would be fair to places like New York and Cape Cod, which are also deeply flawed areas.

The one thing I wouldn’t do is to use the word phony, because it’s sort of dated now and might leave me open to charges of being derivative, which is one luxury a novelist can’t afford. There would have to be a lot of phoniness in the novel, but I’d illustrate it in imaginative ways, like mentioning how on the Cape they dress up the waitresses in mob caps and call hamburgers names like Old King Cole Burgers. I suppose to afford all this traveling I’d need a couple of million dollars, but I’d manage on about $2,000 in the interests of realism. My parents would be divorced, naturally, or maybe my mother would be dead, for pathos, and my father would have this series of very great and good friends, despite the fact he’s old enough to have been in World War II, if not the actual American Revolution. I don’t know yet exactly how I’d end the book but I could just sort of freak out and come to in one of those exclusive mental hospitals, the kind named after a real person, in this case the ancestor of someone I actually knew socially.

I hate that expression, but if you don’t know a person professionally or biblically or vicariously, there’s no synonym for it. Since I’m reasonably sure there are enough publishers who are as impatient as I am, I doubt if there’d be any problem there. Actually, anyone born the year “Catcher in the Rye” appeared is old enough to run for President, so the country has got to be ready for a new voice, or an old voice emerging from a new person. The way I see it, J. D. Salinger would have wanted me to write this book as a sort of homage. Artists do that all the time with each other, and if we’d actually met in that Vermont drugstore, he would have said “Pourquois pas? Give it a spin.”