The circumstance of such worldwide acceptance is amusing and ironic, doubling back upon itself, for Holden Caulfield, hero of the book, scorns the crass side of the world most of us know, and his creator, Salinger, removed himself from it more than 30 years ago. Fame and respect do not always add up to sales, but “Catcher” sells more than a quarter of a million copies annually. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951) is one of the most famous and best-respected novels of our century. If the result of his choice is an awkward and necessarily fragmentary work, it is better than no book at all. His alternative was not to have written a book at all. However, Hamilton had little choice but to do what he has done. Thirty-thousand words directly from Salinger would inevitably have strengthened or enriched this book, whose prose is pale and nervous, perhaps because of the restraints and inhibitions beneath which the rattled Hamilton was forced to work. The original manuscript, Hamilton says, “was not, in those days, really the book I had wanted it to be.” Presumably the present book is better than the abandoned manuscript, but of course I cannot know.
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