By the mid-nineteen-fifties, Salinger had disappeared down his New Hampshire rabbit hole. The New Yorker’s rejection of “The Catcher in the Rye” plainly had no effect on him as a writer. Criticized for creating a family with four precocious children and for writing in a style that drew attention to itself, he proceeded to create a family with seven precocious children, and to produce, in “Zooey” and “Seymour,” works of supreme literary exhibitionism.

”Zooey” and “Seymour” are exhibitionistic because the emotional current driving the characters has become unmoored from anything that has actually happened to them. They are not thrown into a state of higher intensity by trauma or by grief. They are just in a state of higher intensity. In “Franny,” Franny Glass’s spiritual crisis is a kind of screen shielding the rather mundane circumstance that she has been made pregnant by a man who she realizes will remain, all his life, a pompous English major. But in “Zooey,” published two years later, Franny’s spiritual crisis is genuine, because, apparently, having spiritual crises is the price one pays for being a Glass in this lousy world. There is no suggestion of pregnancy. We get Seymour’s Fat Lady instead. After 1955, Salinger stopped writing stories, in the conventional sense. He seemed to lose interest in fiction as an art form—perhaps he thought there was something manipulative or inauthentic about literary device and authorial control. His presence began to dissolve into the world of his creation. He let the puppets take over the theatre.

T_he New Yorker_ had no trouble publishing “Zooey” (which remains the longest piece of fiction it has ever run) and “Seymour.” The magazine seems to have got over its anxiety about credibility and transparency. Salinger changed The New Yorker’s aesthetic, at a time when The New Yorker’s aesthetic was the gold standard for short fiction, and that is one testament to the impact he has had on American writing. There are many more. Philip Roth’s early stories, collected in “Goodbye, Columbus,” have something of Salinger’s voice and comic timing, and it is hard to read Roth’s later funny, kvetchy, mournful monologuists without imagining Holden Caulfield and Zooey Glass as ancestral presences.

Still, Roth was not trying to rewrite “The Catcher in the Rye”; Salinger’s complete lack of irony could hardly have appealed to him. But other writers have tried, at least one in every decade since it appeared. Sylvia Plath made a version of it for girls, in “The Bell Jar” (1963); Hunter Thompson produced one for people who couldn’t believe that Nixon was President and Jim Morrison was dead, in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (1971). Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” (1984) was the downtown edition; Dave Eggers’ “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (2000) is the MTV one. Many books featuring interestingly unhappy young people have been published since “The Catcher in the Rye,” of course, and some of them were written by people who no doubt regarded Salinger as a model and an influence. But that doesn’t make those books “Catcher in the Rye” rewrites. The bar is set a good deal higher than that, and the reason has to do with the Salinger mystique.

Why Salinger chose to drop out of sight and then out of print is his own business, and it probably ought to have nothing to do with the way people read the work that he did publish. But it does. Readers can’t help it. Salinger’s withdrawal is one of the things behind, for example, Holden Caulfield’s transformation from a fictional character into a culture hero: it helped to confirm the belief that Holden’s unhappiness was less personal than it appears—that it was really some sort of protest against modern life. It also helped to confirm the sense, encouraged by Salinger’s own later manner, that there was no distinction between Salinger and his characters—that if you ran into Salinger at the Cornish, New Hampshire, post office (which is where his stalkers generally seem to have run into him) it would be exactly like running into Holden Caulfield or Seymour Glass. By dropping out, Salinger glamorized his misfits, for to be a misfit who can also write like J. D. Salinger—a Holden Caulfield who publishes in The New Yorker—must be very glamorous indeed.

This is why the narrator in a “Catcher in the Rye” rewrite is always a magazine writer. So, of course, is the author of the “Catcher in the Rye” rewrite, and the author and the narrator are separated by barely a hair. The model for the narrator is no longer Holden Caulfield. And it is not J. D. Salinger imagined as Holden Caulfield. It is the author imagined as J. D. Salinger imagined as Holden Caulfield. You can’t, in other words, rewrite “The Catcher in the Rye” simply by telling the story of an unhappy teen-ager and updating the cultural references, or transposing the events to a different city, or changing the sex of the protagonist. You have to reproduce the Salinger mystique, because the mystique has become part of what “The Catcher in the Rye” is. The end product of the ideal Salinger rewrite isn’t a Salinger story. It’s Salinger. To rewrite the story of Holden Caulfield you have to become a melancholy genius, too. You have to be your own sorrow king.

The book that seems, in some ways, closest to Salinger’s is Plath’s. Plath belonged to the first generation of “Catcher in the Rye” readers. She read it sometime before 1953, when she spent part of a summer in New York City as a twenty-year-old intern at Mademoiselle. (When she arrived at the magazine, she asked to be assigned to interview Salinger, whose “Nine Stories” had just been published. She got Elizabeth Bowen instead.) That internship and her subsequent breakdown and hospitalization became the basis, ten years later, for “The Bell Jar.”

Reviewers noticed the similarity to “The Catcher in the Rye” immediately, and there are echoes of Holden’s voice and story in the voice and story of Plath’s heroine, Esther Greenwood. But Plath was not merely borrowing. She must have felt that an aspiring magazine writer in New York City in 1953, when Salinger was in his prime, would naturally see life in a Salingeresque way. When Esther says, for example, “I’m stupid about executions” (1953 is the year the Rosenbergs were executed), she is adopting a Caulfield attitude. Esther’s vague loathing of sex is a loathing learned partly from “The Catcher in the Rye”; her obsession with madness and suicide is partly the obsession of an admirer of “Teddy” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” In other ways, though, “The Bell Jar” and “The Catcher in the Rye” are very different books, and the difference can be summed up by saying that no reader has ever wanted to be Esther Greenwood. Holden (despite the confusion of the Harcourt Brace executive) is not crazy; he tells his story from a sanatorium (where he has gone because of a fear that he has t.b.), not a mental hospital. The brutality of the world makes him sick. It makes Esther insane.