  Bookmark and Share  She nodded. “Make it extraordinarily
squalid and moving,” she suggested. “Are you at all acquainted
with squalor?” I said not exactly but that I was getting better
acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time… —J.D.
Salinger, “For Esme—with Love and Squalor” (1950)  Spin me back
down the years and the days of my youth, as the song says.
April, 1988.  Everyone talks about how reading The Catcher in
the Ryeis one of those seminal rites of passage. Now that J.D.
Salinger has gone to that big field of rye in the sky, everyone
is talking about it all at once. I would be a phony, I figure,
not to include myself (and all). For starters, what do you call
a rite of passage involving a lot of middle-aged (or older)
folks talking about the passing of an author who wrote one of
the ultimate rite of passage novels? Indulgent? Inevitable?
Ironic? All of the above?  By the time I got around to Holden
Caulfield, I was already a senior in high school. Too young? Too
old?Just right? For better