SHELF LIFE: THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
Copyright Little Brown and Company 1991 This column focuses upon those books that have had a role in developing how we think about the world. In my particular experience they tend to be novels, with a book of poems or nonfiction work on intellectual history thrown in. But by and large I have lived my ‘life of the mind’ through Fiction—a misnomer if there ever were one. What this implies is that I prefer fantasy to reality. Rather, I find more reality in what are essentially stories, than I do in factual accounts, because a novel involves a degree of artifice, whereas a newspapers or history books present facts, but mask their intentions by what they specifically say. The novel speaks about the world; about the minds of men and women, children, sometimes animals; about landscape and climate; history and memory; while at the same time also presenting facts and poetry in the service of truth. Each novel has in turn its own truth, characterized by the author’s