MANY OF US find it hard to separate the pleasures of “The Catcher in the Rye” from memories of the peevish delight it gave us as teenagers. From the first page, where narrator Holden Caulfield insists he won’t be sharing his “goddam autobiography or anything,” J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel was and remains irresistibly irreverent. Then comes his decimating verbal attack on the prep school that has expelled him—“on account of I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself and all,” says our surly, often hilarious hero. Holden, mentally fragile and keenly observant, escapes to spend a couple of days in his hometown, Manhattan, doing whatever he pleases before slinking back to his parents’ Upper East Side apartment. We follow him on a distinctly New York odyssey that seems especially wistful in the spring of 2020—from a Midtown ice-skating rink to a “jam-packed” nightclub in Greenwich Village to “mobbed and messy” Broadway, as he comments on the “jerks, “phonies” and “knockouts” he encounters along the way. Salinger’s descriptions of the city aren’t always rosy, but reading them induces a poignant nostalgia—not just for midcentury New York but for just a few weeks ago, before the city became the epicenter of the deadly coronavirus and the stay-at-home orders drained Manhattan of its incessant hustle.
