Camille tells us she feels almost as much an alien in 1950s New York as she does in 1600s London. This is very understandable. It derives from what we psychiatrists call the Antipodean Strangeness Factor which renders its victims uneasy in any culture based more than 200 miles north of Sydney. JD, on the other hand feels much closer to the adolescents of 40 years ago than to their parents. Yet I have to say that to a young man in London in 1957, when it came to shared experiences, the bootlegger of 1920 seemed no more remote than the teenager from Upper East Side New York. I could feel my heart turn over for both of them. I had been just as idealistically obsessed with my own Daisy as I'd been enraged by the posturings of my elders. And along with Matt I have to ask what standards of reading & judgement could seriously place Holden at the very pinnacle of all Western literary endeavour ? Scottie B.