If some potty catch some potty...
A kindly professor has taken pity on me and is mentoring me
through a writing project. In recent
weeks he suggested I read “The Laughing Man,” by J. D. Salinger. I fulfilled my duty in this regard of an
instant, but then I got paranoid. There
is a book, just this one, that I had never read and when anyone found this out
they would freak out on me and press
copies into my hand with the most fervent urgings and intonations. What was I going to do if this professor
wanted to talk to me about The Book?
So at long last I have read The Catcher in the Rye and understand, in more than just a glimmering kind of way, what people mean when they describe a first-person narrator as “a female Holden Caufield for the twenty-first century,” though why people persist in saying this sort of thing is, now more than ever, beyond me.
There is nothing I can tell you about this book that you don’t already know (excepting, perhaps, that I’m sorry I never returned the copy you loaned me when you said it would change my life) save this: my three-year old is being toilet trained and she now refuses to go to the bathroom without being allowed to “read” The Catcher in the Rye. For real.
