While Duddy is a little more upbeat and slapstick, Holden is brooding and cynical. He probably introduced the idea to me that people can have problems and be hospitalised for mysterious unseen ill-ness. Duddy had plans, ambition. He wasn't going to let the bastards get him down. "A man without land is nobody".
Mordecai Richler was a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction, poetry, and worked on the screen adaptations to his novels. He won numerous awards for Canadian Fiction and for many years was a journalist for several North American publications. He penned many criticisms of Canadian Nationalism and the Québec nationalist movement, putting him at odds with the people of the very province he loved so much.
Jerome David Salinger himself never published anything after the 1960's. There have been a number of biographies of him written over the years during and after his death in 2010 at the age of 91, including a new film and companion biography based on his life by author David Shields and screenwriter Shane Salerno. They're not receiving the best of reviews. Stephen Colbert has devoted his second Book Club instalment to the reclusive author. An act of homage? or more disregard for J. D.'s wish to remain out of the spotlight. To be sure, just as Salinger himself, his relatives have remained silent to the public for many years and do not cooperate with such invasions of privacy.
"If you want to know the truth, I don't know what I think about it. I'm sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I miss that goddamn Maurice. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody".--Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye
