J.D. Salinger’s cultural significance seems beyond dispute. The Catcher in the Rye is a book read even by those who don’t read much. When Mark David Chapman assassinated John Lennon in 1980, he said the reason could be found in the novel’s pages. When John “Goumba” Sialiano spoke in 1999 of his role in the “Scores” nightclub case against John Gotti Jr., he explained, “I’m the Holden Caulfield of Scores. I’m Goumba in the Rye.” In such books as Don DeLillo’s Mao II, such movies as Field of Dreams and Jerry Maguire, Salinger has become a stand-in — our living metaphor, holed up in the New Hampshire woods — for the innocence that needs protection from the outside world. A bestselling author from Catcher in the Rye in 1951 to Franny and Zooey in 1961, Salinger hasn’t published since 1965, but he remains as famous as ever — more famous than ever as each year of silence goes by.
Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World, published last year, is only the most recent episode in the search for America’s best-known hermit. It describes in detail a nine-month affair she had in 1972 with the sometimes sentimental and sometimes misanthropic writer. Salinger was then fifty-three, while Maynard was eighteen; he was a famous author, while she was a precocious and ambitious girl with a New York Times Magazine cover story to her credit. Their affair started with a fan letter from Salinger, peaked with Maynard’s quitting school to move in with him, and ended in the middle of a trip to Florida — when Salinger told her to pack up and go home.
