Look, I'm Gone by James Howard Kunstler is a
coming-of-age novel set in New York City over the 1963 Thanksgiving holiday
season.
Jeff Greenaway, 12 years
old, is a student at Ponsonby Hall, a New Hampshire boarding school for troubled adolescents
from wealthy families. President Kennedy’s assassination disrupts the orderly
life of the school, and school authorities decide to release the kids a few
days early for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Jeff returns to his parents' home
in Manhattan and spends the next several days exploring New York City, watching
movies, and spending a wad of cash he obtained at a schoolboy poker game.
On a whim, Jeff enters
"Dreamboat Landing," a dance studio advertising "Girls, Girls,
Girls... 25 cents a dance." He dances with Yvonne, a young, working-class
woman who teaches him the box step and the foxtrot.
During their brief encounter,
Yvonne decides that Jeff is a screwed up but decent kid, and she impulsively gives
him her copy of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.
"Here," she tells him, "the story of your life."
Jeff is enchanted by the novel,
which he reads three times over a few days. He identifies with Holden
Caulfield, the book's depressed and morose main character, and soon adopts
Holden's persona, including the fictional character's habit of inserting
the word "goddamn" into casual conversations.
Like Jeff, Holden Caulfield is a
boarding school student on holiday in Manhattan. Jeff is amazed at how much
Holden Caulfield's world resembles his own. He begins to feel that Catcher
in the Rye was written specifically for him, like "a message in a
bottle."
Thanks to Salinger's
book, Jeff recognizes "the phoniness and pointlessness of everything
around him," and he embraces Holden's view that the “goddamn
world is full of phonies."
However, Jeff Greenaway is not
Holden Caulfield, and his holiday odyssey in New York City differs from Holden’s.
In a bold move, he talks his way backstage at a Broadway theater and persuades
a beautiful child star to have dinner with him at a swank restaurant.
And Jeff has another un-Holden-like
experience. Jeff believes that the Russians assassinated President Kennedy,
which leads him to stake out the Russian UN embassy. The Russian
ambassador, touched by Jeff's naive intensity, tells Jeff that "truth will
set you free," and that the CIA, not the Russians, killed President
Kennedy.
Jeff's initial attraction
to Catcher in the Rye leads him to search out Salinger's other
books: Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters.
He hopes these works will be as inspiring as Salinger's blockbuster, but he
finds them boring and incomprehensible.
On his return trip to boarding
school, Jeff finds out where Salinger lives, and he manages to have an extended
conversation with the reclusive author on a snowy New England night. I won’t
tell you about that passage in the book, because that would spoil Kunstler’s
story for people reading Look, I’m Gone.
Catcher in the Rye is often described as a coming-of-age
novel, and the book is required reading at some American schools. But Salinger’s
novel is not a coming-of-age tale, because Holden never achieves the mature self-awareness
that young people must obtain to transition from youth to adulthood. At the novel's
end, Holden is as depressed as he was at the beginning.
Look, I’m Gone is an exorcism of Catcher in the Rye.
Unlike Holden Caulfield, Jeff Greenaway engages with the world around him,
takes chances, and embraces new and unsettling experiences—like his meeting
with a Russian diplomat and his brief encounter with a vibrant child actor.
Millions of young Americans will
read Catcher in the Rye and become depressed, cynical, and world-weary.
Thus, as an antidote, I recommend all Salinger fans to read Look, I’m Gone
immediately after reading Catcher in the Rye.
However, one need not read Catcher in the Rye to appreciate Kunstler's novel. Look, I'm Gone stands on its own as one of the great American coming-of-age tales beside Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Richard Bradford's Red Sky at Morning, John Knowles's A Separate Peace, and Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy.
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| Image credit: Slate |