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Sometimes truth isn't just stranger than fiction, it's also more interesting and better plotted. Salinger helped to pioneer a genre where fiction was deliberately less remarkable than reality. His protagonist says little, does little, and thinks little, and yet Salinger doesn't string Holden up as a satire of deluded self-obsessives, he is rather the epic archetype of the boring, yet self-important depressive.

I've taken the subway and had prolonged conversations on the street with prostitutes (not concerning business matters), and I can attest that Salinger's depiction is often accurate to what it feels like to go through an average, unremarkable day. However, reading about an average day is no more interesting than living one.

Beyond that, Salinger doesn't have the imagination to paint people as strangely as they really are. Chekhov's 'normal' little people seem more real and alive than Salinger's because Chekhov injects a little oddness, a little madness into each one. Real people are almost never quite as boring as modernist depictions, because everyone has at least some ability to surprise you.

Salinger's world is desaturated. Emotions and moments seep into one another, indistinct as the memories of a drunken party. Little importance is granted to events or thoughts, but simply pass by, each duly tallied by an author in the role of court reporter.

What is interesting about this book is not that it is realistically bland, but that it is artificially bland. Yet, as ridiculous a concept as that is, it still takes itself entirely in earnest, never acknowledging the humor of its own blase hyperbole.

This allows the book to draw legions of fans from all of the ridiculously dull people who take themselves as seriously as Holden takes himself. They read it not as a parody of bland egotism but a celebration, poised to inspire all the bland egotists who have resulted from the New Egalitarianism in Art, Poetry, Music, and Academia.

Those same folks who treat rationality and intellectual fervor like a fashion to be followed, imagining that the only thing required to be brilliant is to mimic the appearance and mannerisms of the brilliant; as if black berets were the cause of poetic inspiration and not merely a symptom.

One benefit of this is that one can generally sniff out pompous faux intellectuals by the sign that they hold up Holden as a sort of messianic figure. Anyone who marks out Holden as a role-model is either a deluded teen with an inflated sense of entitlement, or is trying to relive the days when they were.

But what is more interesting is that those who idolize Holden tend to be those who most misunderstand him. Upon close inspection, he's , not consumed with ennui or an existential crisis, he's actually suffering from 'Shell Shock'--now known as 'Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder'.

The way he thinks about his brother's and classmate's deaths--going over the details again and again in his mind, but with no emotional connection--it's not symptomatic of depression, but of psychological trauma. He is stuck in a cycle, unable to process events, going over them again and again, but never able to return to normalcy.

It takes a certain kind of self-centered prick to look at someone's inability to cope with the reality of death and think "Hey, that's just like my mild depression over how my parents won't buy me a newer ipod!" It's not an unusual stance in American literature--there's an arrogant detachment in American thought which has become less and less pertinent as the world grows and changes. As recently as The Road we have American authors comparing a difficult father-son relationship to the pain and turmoil of an African civil war survivor--and winning awards for displaying their insensitive arrogance.

Perhaps it's time we woke up and realized that the well-fed despondence of the white man should not be equated with a lifetime of death, starvation, war, and traumas both physical and emotional. And as for Salinger--a real sufferer of Post-Traumatic Stress who was one of the first soldiers to see a concentration camp, who described how you can never forget the smell of burning flesh--I can only imagine how he felt when people read his story of a man, crippled by the thought of death, and thought to themselves "Yes, that's just what it's like to be a trustafarian with uncool parents". No wonder he became a recluse and stopped publishing.