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ability of a book to lessen isolation is important, not simply for personal growth, but for cultural and societal growth as well. Before the advent of television, books were the primary vehicle for discoveringboth the mysteries and the essential human similarities of those a world away. By the fiftieth anniversary of the author’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp,
The Diary of Anne Frank
had sold twenty million copies in fifty-five languages; while its validity as a Holocaust document or a work of art has been debated over and over, there can be no doubt that for several generations of American children who had never heard of the death camps and perhaps never met a Jew, the universality of Anne’s adolescent experiences and the horrible specificity of her imprisonment began to open a window on prejudice that might otherwise have longer stayed shut.
The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Naked and the Dead:
the great novels of war have helped create both patriots and pacifists, among those who have never, will never, see combat. The peculiar jacket copy for
Catcher in the Rye
when it first appeared in paperback, with an awkward representational drawing that predated the now famous austere red jacket, seems to have some sense of its psychological alchemy. “This unusual book,” it reads, as though no more specific adjective were available, “may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart—but you will never forget it.” And, of course, that is how Salinger’s novel has been thought of since it was published in 1951: not in terms of its literary merits, but as a book that has enabled generations of adolescentsto feel more like human beings and less like visitors from another planet. Scarcely anyone reads it after age twenty-one, which is irrelevant, perhaps even desirable, to readers under the age of eighteen who find in it proof positive that no one understands them—and that this is a universal condition.
    Catcher in the Rye
is a signal example of what reading does so well, not only because it has resonated with so many but also because it has enraged so many. When, each year, the American Library Association issues its report on the banning of books by school libraries, it is full of titles about gay life, about sexuality, about witchcraft and the occult. But Salinger’s novel is an evergreen on the list, challenged and removed from shelves in virtually every part of the country year after year, even as it continues to be one of the most consistently assigned books on high school reading lists. Parents who have opposed it most frequently complain that it shows a complete disregard for the authority of adults. And indeed it does, which is why adolescents, whose need to disregard the authority of parents is deep and real and transient, perennially place it on their list of favorite books. It challenges the established order, as do many great books—as do many of the books on the banned books list.
    My first real encounter with the controversy that can surround a book taught me all this convincinglyand on an exceedingly small and intimate scale, taught me about individual taste, about adolescent insurrection, about that great chasm that sometimes arises between one generation and another. My gentle mother was sitting in our living room when she literally hurled the book she had been reading across the coffee table and onto the floor, where chance—and good fortune—made it land not far from my own feet. “This is a dirty book!” my mother said, leaving the room, leaving the book, leaving me to discover that
Portnoy’s Complaint
was as funny and intelligent a novel as I had ever read. I have to wonder now, with teenagers in the house, what my mother was thinking that day. Didn’t she know that the book felt deeply true at some level, that its sexual content was merely the garment to clothe its important notions about the nature of masculinity? And, above all,