Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Salinger, J(erome) D(avid) (Vol. 12) - Frank Kermode

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FRANK KERMODE

What meaning, if any, can one attach to the expression 'a key book of the present decade'? It is used as a blurb in a … reprint of [The Catcher in the Rye]…. Whoever remembers the book will suppose that this is a serious claim, implying perhaps that The Catcher, as well as being extremely successful, is a work of art existing in some more or less profound relationship with the 'spirit of the age.' It is, anyway, quite different from saying that No Orchids for Miss Blandish is a key book. On the other hand, there is an equally clear distinction between this book and such key novels as Ulysses or A Passage to India. For it is elementary that, although these books have been read by very large numbers of people, one may reasonably distinguish between a smaller, 'true' audience and bigger audiences which read them quite differently, and were formerly a fortuitous addition to the "highbrow' public. But although Salinger...

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1. Introduction
2. ARTHUR HEISERMAN and JAMES E. MILLER, JR.
3. Frank Kermode
4. Paul Levine
5. Dan Wakefield
6. Arthur Mizener
7. Granville Hicks
8. Michael Walzer
9. Carl F. Strauch
10. John Hermann
11. Robert M. Browne
12. Joan Didion
13. Leslie Fiedler
14. John Updike
15. Warren French
16. CAROL and RICHARD OHMANN
17. GERALDINE De LUCA
18. James Lundquist
19. Copyright

1. Joan Didion