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Right now, I’m sitting in a public library in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, while my girlfriend Quinn takes the MCAT on the opposite side of the city, which we woke up at 5:40 a.m. to drive to for her 8:00 a.m. test. This is the second library I’ve visited in Greensboro in the hope of finding some books by Salinger to look over while writing this article about him.

The first library had none, and this second one currently holds just “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” which actually is the only book by Salinger that I don’t have much interest in reexamining. I’d never seen Greensboro before today, and I’m glad I don’t live here or anywhere else in North Carolina, but I can say this for the city: before coming to the library, I took a nap in my car in a parking lot outside a Food Lion, and nobody attempted to carjack or murder me.

Instead of reading Salinger, I’m reading his obituaries. When I found out that he’d died, the first thing I did was visit the New York Times online to read about all the things I already knew, from his childhood in Manhattan to his seclusion in New Hampshire. In a way less ironic than inevitable, Salinger’s hermitage only boosted his celebrity – boosted it, indeed, beyond celebrity and into mythology.

Part of that surely had to do with his fiction – how his characters’ dissatisfactions with the world and their consequent retreats into suicide and sanatoriums and Eastern mysticism and, yes, the rural Northeast mirrored what we supposed was Salinger’s own rebellion against the pettiness of mankind. A few articles already have quoted his Franny Glass: “Everything everybody does is so – I don’t know – not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless – and sad-making.” His characters are like garrulous Bartlebys, clear-sighted and heartbroken and rejective.

We all remember, too, Holden’s ceaseless condemnations – everything is “phony” – and teenagers often respond with enthusiastic identification to his cynical demeanor. The character articulates perfectly, in his rough and slangy and sentimental voice, that moment in adolescence where one suddenly intuits the emptiness behind the façades of the adult world.

As grown-up readers, we’re supposed to notice the humorous incongruity between the boy’s words and his feelings – he wants truth but tells only lies, wants love but hates everyone – yet I still don’t feel superior to Holden Caulfield. There are certain characters in fiction who, even when they are wrong, are more right than you or I will ever be. Holden is a strange kind of moral and emotional genius – to me, he’s the saint Salinger intended Seymour Glass to be. Unlike the gorgeous and talented Glass children, Holden is a screw-up and doesn’t command our love dictatorially – he wins it by some alchemy of insight, puerility, humor, spite, and tenderness that creates his own unique and authentic brilliance.

After “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951), Salinger published three more books, including “Nine Stories,” a collection of great beauty and mystery; and “Franny and Zooey,” a pair of interlocking stories – 1955’s “Franny,” short and acute, and 1957’s “Zooey,” which started the second phase of Salinger’s career, where all his tenderness turned inward, his conversational prose turned arch, and his easy charm turned prickly. He began to confine his considerable descriptive powers to a family of prodigies who could not ever exist on Earth.

There is good material in “Zooey” and “Seymour: An Introduction,” to be sure, but something had changed. For all the misanthropy and gloom of his early work, his characters were trying to engage the “sad-making” world and find something worthwhile within it. By 1957, Salinger had withdrawn to his own shimmering world of delicate demigods, where the likes of Sally Hayes and Lane Coutell didn’t merit attention; his earlier sensitivity had transformed into a farrago of vaguely pompous tics and recurring obsessions. That Salinger recognized his latter-day characters’ preciousness and his own introversion doesn’t make either quality less off-putting.

But, then, we’ll always have Holden, and maybe we’ll get more now that Salinger has passed away – rumors have floated around for years that he earmarked manuscripts in his vault for posthumous publication – but I doubt it, and after all, Holden is enough. There’s a funny thing about Salinger’s famously lifelike dialogue, with its strategic italics and New York argot: his idiom has completely expired, but his characters’ discourse, like Holden’s narration, remains fresher than anything I’ve read recently.

Salinger touched upon something contemporary that remains contemporary and perhaps always will. In a mostly derisive essay, Tom Wolfe remarked quite correctly upon “the anguish he could make rise up between lines of seemingly casual, lighthearted prose,” and I think this has something to do with it. Salinger captured the pain of the new world, the cracks in the comforts, the peculiar despair inspired by a shrug or an offhand comment, the abyss behind the polite smile. It’s appropriate, after all, that his greatest wisdom came from the mouth of a boy who may not so very incorrectly be termed a spoiled brat.

Quinn is done with the MCAT, and I’m now finishing up this column from a dark bedroom in Durham, NC, while Quinn’s roommates play beer pong in the apartment’s living room to celebrate her friend’s birthday.

Holden hopes that, when he dies, someone will have “sense enough” to dump him in a river somewhere, a line I’ll always remember. “Who wants flowers when you’re dead?” he says. I don’t know what will happen to the remains of Salinger himself. Surely there is a rarefied plot reserved for the Glass family, but I’d rather float anonymously through the dark water with Holden. The music is very loud through the door. Sometimes I can picture the river.

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