JE: High atop my reading list is Larry Watson’s American Boy, just released from the superlative Milkweed Editions. American Boy came highly recommended from my pal Benjamin Percy, who had this to say:

“There are a handful of writers I push on everyone I meet, and Larry Watson is one of them. For the past twenty years has quietly penned some of the wisest, most powerful novels in my library, and I am thrilled to make room on the shelf for his latest, a gripping, poignant coming-of-age story that opens with a gunshot that will ultimately bury its bullet in your heart. American Boy is an American classic.”

When We Fell In Love by Larry Watson

We don’t believe in arranged marriages in this country, so it stands to reason books read in classrooms can have a hard time claiming our hearts. This was especially true in the era when I was being educated, often against my will. In high school we were assigned Silas Marner; in college I had a professor who often stated his belief that contemporary fiction and poetry were not meant for serious study but our “leisure reading.” As soon as a literary work became an assignment, I wanted to run in the other direction. (Which partly explains the grievous gaps in my education.)

But ironically a book that has attained classic status and is now frequently studied in classrooms is exactly the book that made me want to write, or, more accurately, made writing fiction seem possible, whereas it had previously seemed an activity beyond my ken. I had, you see, writerly impulses before I had anywhere to go with them; I had no models and no instruction to accompany those impulses. In other words, I wanted to write novels and stories, yet nothing seemed to me more daunting than writing novels and stories.

When I first picked up The Catcher in the Rye, it likely wasn’t assigned reading in any school. (In years to come it would not only be widely assigned but banned, an interesting curricular circle.) I knew next to nothing about it when I opened its cover, and I might even have believed, and hoped, that it was a sports novel. (The cover of the edition I read depicted a young man wearing a red cap backward and carrying a suitcase; he could very well have been, to my way of thinking, a young catcher who had just been signed to a minor league contract.)

People my age often describe transcendent experiences with art, literature, music, or drugs in violent physical terms. It knocked me out. It blew me away. It blew my mind. It took the top of my head off. Well, The Catcher in the Rye did all those things to me and more. Holden and his exploits were moving, inspiring, hilarious.

He was heroic because he went his own way, he refused to conform, he recognized hypocrisy—that awareness that teenagers think is the height of wisdom. He was authentic, I believed, in a world of phonies. Only on later rereading did I realize how deeply troubled Holden was, and how much he needed someone ready to catch him when he came close to the cliff.

The reaction that mattered the most to my future as a writer, however, was this: An author can write like this? It’s possible not only to write about a neurotic smart ass teenager, but you can use his actual language to do it? Maybe I can write something like that someday—hell, I already talk like that. When I closed The Catcher in the Rye my own stories and novels were years ahead of me, but I was on my way. Writing fiction no longer seemed like something I’d have to be dead and/or a genius to do.

How much it’s due to Salinger and his creation I’m not sure, but I’ve written a number of stories and books about young males, though seldom in their argot. My narratives are almost always retrospectives, adults looking back on their youth. And when, after Salinger died, I reread The Catcher in the Rye, the novel once again did something fierce and physical to me: It broke my heart. But that can only happen to those who have fallen in love.