Salinger was a schmuck.

I couldn’t tell you what makes for a believable character, but I can give you an example of a character that never rang true to me: Holden Caulfield. That’s right, the monkey to J.D. Salinger’s organ grinder. Never in my life have I come across a character that I found more (dare I say it?) phony than this young man. When I read Catcher in the Rye I was Holden’s age, and I actually found myself saying, out loud to the book, "Are you f---ing kidding me?" Nothing that Holden did, no way that he behaved, made any sense to me. In fact, the title of the paper I had to write on the book was, "Holden Caulfield is a schmuck." Of course, with hindsight, I realize I was wrong. It wasn't Caulfield who was the schmuck.

(For the record, I also read Nine Stories, and Franny and Zooey, and upon completing the latter swore that I would never torment myself in such a way again. Indeed, my idea of hell would be spending eternity locked in an empty room with nothing to read except the works of J.D. Schmuckinger.)

Oddly enough (insert wry smile here), in The Art and Craft of Storytelling, Lamb states that she has never known anyone who was not “mesmerized by the protagonist of this brilliantly realized novel.” I laughed out loud when I read this, because the only way I could ever consider myself mesmerized by Holden Caulfield is if ‘mesmerized’ suddenly came to mean ‘annoyed’.

Now, with regard to plot, I think believability is something that can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. What may be believable in one case may not be in another. However, I agree wholeheartedly with Lamb that anything that happens in the plot ought to be feasible, and seem to be the inevitable consequence of some previous action, statement, cognition, etc.

Far too many times have I found myself in the middle of a story, scratching my head and wondering if I missed something, because all of the sudden the plot had taken a turn that just didn’t seem to make sense. In a few cases, my ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ was ripped away so violently that it never returned, and I never finished the book. And in a testament to how memorable the experience made them, I can not recall the title of even one of the books in question.

-Dennis