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By Root 1557 0

The announcement stirred long-restrained hopes that Salinger had decided to end his seclusion by delivering a continuation of his classic novel. A search for further details led readers to the website of the sequel’s publisher, the Swedish-based Nicotext, and its offshoot, Windupbird Publishing. The content there offered more questions than answers. The publication was titled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. Although available for purchase in Britain, it was not scheduled for release in America until September. A brief description of the book’s plot was vaguely familiar. 60 Years Later featured the travels of a seventy-six-year-old character named Mr. C, who roves the streets of Manhattan after having escaped his retirement home, much the same way Holden Caulfield had wandered the streets of New York after fleeing his prep school decades before. If potential readers somehow missed the point, 60 Years Later hailed itself as “a marvellous sequel to one of our most beloved classics.”

Information on the author was even less straightforward. Identified only by the pseudonym John David California, his biography consisted of his former employment as gravedigger and Ironman triathlete and described his first encounter with Salinger’s novel “in an abandoned cabin in rural Cambodia.” If any hope of Salinger’s involvement remained after reading California’s biography, it was extinguished by a review of the publisher’s Internet catalog, an array of joke books, sex dictionaries, and flip-book porn.

When, after seeing the website, the press began to speculate that the entire matter might be a hoax, the author of 60 Years Later was compelled to reveal his true identity. John David California was actually the Swedish writer Fredrik Colting, the founder and owner of Nicotext and Windupbird Publishing. In an appeal to The Sunday Telegraph, Colting asked to be taken seriously. “This is no spoof,” he intoned. “We are not concerned about any legal issues. We think 60 Years Later is a very original story that complements Catcher in the Rye.”4

Salinger was widely considered to be gleefully litigious—especially when it came to Holden Caulfield and The Catcher in the Rye—and Colting’s reference to legal issues seemed to reinforce the suspicion already implied by the press that he was attempting to lure Salinger into a legal battle in the hope of garnering publicity for his book. At the same time, he appeared genuinely taken aback by events, alternately perplexed and stunned by the magnitude of reaction his book was generating. After producing a number of low-profile publications in Sweden, each audacious and irreverent, he seemed to have written the sequel in complete ignorance of the emotional attachment of so many to The Catcher in the Rye. “I did not set out to create a bang, to upset anyone or to simply hitch a ride on the Salinger express,” he protested. “All I wanted was to write a good book with some newness about it.”5

The concept of “newness” was precisely at issue. When Phyllis Westberg, Salinger’s longtime agent at Ober Associates, obtained a copy of Colting’s book, she promised to examine it on Salinger’s behalf for any creative merits that might safely place it beyond his copyright. But the outcome was inevitable.* Comparing the sequel to Salinger’s original, Westberg found many scenes and events conspicuously similar, with Holden’s vernacular and psyche unchanged from 1951. The characters, too, were the same, although they had become pathetic with age (Holden can no longer control his bladder, and Phoebe has descended into a life of drug addiction). There was one major difference between 60 Years Later and The Catcher in the Rye, and it may have been the difference that Westberg considered most injurious. Delving deeper into the book, she encountered the character of Salinger. In an arc now reminiscent of Mary Shelley, Holden travels to Cornish to confront his creator, who has revived his literary “monster” in order to kill him. By the end of May, Westberg had completed her assessment and consulted with Salinger. Responding