Creating a narrative voice that captures the authentic speech patterns of young people is a challenge for novelists. Young narrators need an idiomatic style of speech that reflects their (sub)culture, they need verbal tics and expressions that reflect their unique character, and finally, they need a tone and pitch that reflects their age.
Since JD Salinger's recent death his legacy and his contemporary relevance have been discussed in detail. Like all popular books, The Catcher in the Rye has a lot of detractors; some say it's not a serious book for adults, others say that in an era of internet porn and hydroponics it's barely relevant to contemporary youth.
But agreement is more or less universal about its powerful narrative voice. Only Mark Twain is equally renowned for his ability to "talk" to readers with such ease in the voice of a young person.
Twain turned the colloquial ramblings of an effusive, uneducated, naive Southern boy into world class literature. Huckleberry Finn was hillbilly-smart but unworldly, and Twain used this innocence to great effect, highlighting the injustices of 19th-century America. Salinger used the voice of an educated teenage city boy to anatomise post-war America. Holden Caulfield is not so innocent, he's older than Huckleberry and experienced enough to see through the "phony" adult world, even if he's powerless to confront it.
Both voices are distinct, rich and pure. By the end of the first sentence in Catcher, one of the most famous voices in English literature is already unmistakeable:
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
The Catcher in the Rye seems to have become the benchmark for any novel with a young narrator, perhaps because there are so few books with young narrators that appeal to adult readers. Books with young narrators are generally written for and read by younger readers, but there are some exceptions.
Bret Easton Ellis's first novel Less Than Zero was well-received and references to Salinger were made (although Ellis's narrator is an 18-year old college boy living in the MTV era). MJ Hyland's debut How the Light Gets In was praised for offering a contemporary, female Holden, just as cynical and sensitive, but with less self-conscious verbiage:
I don't know how the old woman sitting next to me can stuff warm chicken into a bread roll and eat it, while right in front of her there's a picture of a gurney covered in leather straps in an execution chamber.
Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is narrated by Christopher, a 15-year-old British boy with Asperger's syndrome whose strange logical powers contrast beautifully with his lack of emotional insight. The book's only similarity with Salinger's work seems to be the age of the respective narrators, but comparisons are still made. Even Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha gets the odd Salinger comparison, and Doyle's narrator is just 10 years old.
Some novelists make their narrators adults who reflect on childhood, thus making the Salinger comparisons difficult. The Scout Finch who narrates To Kill a Mocking Bird is arguably the most famous child narrator, but she is also a mature adult.
Margaret Atwood's acclaimed Cat's Eye also uses an adult narrator, but Elaine reflects on her childhood in present tenses, as if she were once more a young girl. This allows Atwood to use the language and insight of a mature woman while maintaining a child's narration:
Cordelia sits with nonchalance, nudging me with her elbow now and then, staring blankly at the other people with her grey-green eyes, opaque and glinting as metal.
Francie, the narrator in Patrick McCabe's Butcher Boy, also reflects on his childhood from an older age. He is still immature, however, and reads like a psychopathic Holden Caulfield with a realistically poetic sense of simile and metaphor.
Ma pulled me down the stairs and gave me the mother and father of a flaking but it took more out of her than it did out of me for her hands were trembling like leaves in the breeze she threw the stick from her and steadied herself in the kitchen saying she was sorry over and over.
The challenges of writing in the voice of a young narrator are off-puttingly severe, and the rare novels that succeed have a potent sentimental appeal. More than anything, perhaps, readers love the delightful aural power of a young narrator. Young people today may not speak like Holden Caulfield, but an essence of youth echoes from Holden's voice even now. I wonder which other young narrators will be remembered in future years.
