The Phony on the Carousel

J.D. Salinger’s lost sequel to ‘The Catcher in the Rye’

You probably won’t believe me, but they found another goddamn book by Salinger. Yeah. Turns out old J.D. wasn’t just sitting around up in Cornish sipping tea and muttering about phonies all those years. He was writing. And not just writing—he was writing about Holden again. The bastard actually went and gave The Catcher in the Rye a sequel. Can you believe that? More adventures of Holden Caulfield. I’ll be damned.

They found the manuscript locked in a trunk after he died. Real dramatic stuff. And if that isn’t the most goddamn Salinger thing you ever heard, I don’t know what is.

So what’s the book about? It’s about Holden, of course, except he’s not teenage Holden wearing a red hunting cap anymore. He’s a rich Wall Street trader now, wears expensive suits and calls people “buddy” without meaning it. That’s right. Holden Caulfield has turned into a phony. You read it and you want to sock him right in the face. It’s that bad. And the worst part is, he’s got a kid. A real live kid, and he barely even looks at him. The boy’s a troublemaker, just like Holden was at that age, and old Caulfield can’t stand him. That about kills you. It really does.

Then one day Caulfield’s walking through Central Park—because that place is a goddamn Mecca to phonies—and he sees an old carousel getting torn down. The same carousel. That one. And he just about loses it. Not in the cute, angsty, goddamn-everything-is-phony kind of way. In the full-grown-man-having-a-breakdown-in-broad-daylight kind of way.

You see, old Caulfield was microdosing LSD, which is the sort of thing Wall Street phonies do now, and ends up going full Holden again. Wandering around New York, looking up old faces. The ones who are still alive, anyway. Some of them are just as phony as before, some of them are worse. Some of them are dead. That about kills you too.

But somewhere in all of it, the real Holden Caulfield—the one from before, the one we all read about—starts coming back. He wakes up. He quits his job on Wall Street and buys the carousel. Yeah. Buys it. Like some kind of goddamn saint of lost childhoods. Real madman stuff. Then he starts fixing it up, spending time with his kid, actually showing up to ball games instead of just making up excuses. And when his kid comes by the carousel, riding around with his friends, Holden just watches. He watches and watches and you know what? He’s happy.

If you really want to hear about it, I don’t know if the book’s any good. I swear to God, I really don’t. But I’ll tell you one thing—it doesn’t feel phony. And that’s got to count for something.