Classic Or Dud: Writing A Book Review In The Voice Of Holden Caulfield For The MOst Prestigious Newspaper In The United States Even Though You Are Not, In Fact, A 16 Year Old Boy Who Thinks He Is Rea

Who's Afraid of Holden Caulfield?

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By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: August 23, 2005

If you really want to hear what I think about this guy Dwight Wilmerding, the first thing I should tell you is that he kind of reminds me of me.

In "Indecision," Dwight - or this ghostwriter he got, Benjamin Kunkel - goes into a lot more of all that David Copperfield kind of stuff than I ever would, and he's a helluva lot older than I was when I went through my madman phase, but still, you've gotta admit we're coming from the same sort of place.

We both live in New York City. We're both really close to our sisters. We're both hung up on our prep schools, even though Dwight graduated like a whole 10 years ago. We're both used to getting the ax - me from a bunch of schools, Dwight from his crummy job as a tech support guy at Pfizer.

We both have trouble applying ourselves, or like one of my old teachers said, we've got trouble finding the size of our minds. And we both act a lot younger than we really are. When I was 17, I acted like I was 13, and Dwight, who's 28, acts like he's still 17: he and his slacker friends live in a dormlike apartment, spend a lot of time listening to the Dead, ingest tons of drugs and hold lots of zeitgeisty conversations about Truth and Love and Meaning.

Dwight says "dude" an awful lot, but boy, the guy is a real talker: he's got this voice that just grabs your attention and won't let go, even when you think you're not particularly interested in all the philosophy stuff he's always prattling away about like he's some sort of Walker Percy character or something. That was never my bag, metaphysics and all - I was always more partial to meat-and-potatoes writers like Ring Lardner - but old Dwight, I admit, is pretty great at soliloquizing, maybe not as great as people say I, Holden, was in my heyday, but pretty damn good all the same.

This is a guy who went into therapy with his own sister, who'd apparently read all these psychoanalysis books and wanted to encourage him to examine his inner life. And you get the feeling that he's the sort of guy who, when you first meet him and say, "How's it going?" he's going to give you his emotional temperature down to the last decimal point, and tell you how hard it is being 28 and how he's worried he's somehow mediocre and typical, and how he's got issues with his parents and being a privileged child of the privileged class.

As I've said before, I was never into talking about where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like - certainly not to someone I've just met that very moment - and I usually think of blabbermouths like Dwight as a royal pain in the you-know-what. Still, he's funny, Dwight is, and kind of earnest and definitely a lost soul, which in the end, I admit, really sort of gets to you. I mean, at one point the guy compares himself to a dog or thinks his father thinks of him as a dog - as a big, friendly hound, waiting, head cocked, for an emotional biscuit.

Like the title of this memoir (or what Mr. Kunkel, a founding editor of n + 1 magazine, is calling his first novel) suggests, Dwight makes a very big deal out of his problems making decisions. He doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. He doesn't know if he should commit to the girl he's dating. He doesn't know if he should look for a new job. The poor guy is so paralyzed by the maybes, he doesn't even know what to order in a restaurant. It just kills me that he makes all his decisions by tossing a coin.

So when this girl Natasha he knew back in school - there we are on prep school again! - - e-mails him from Ecuador, sort of but not really inviting him down, Dwight does his coin-toss thing. A couple times. And right before he sets off on his trip, this friend of his, who's got connections at this drug company, offers him this trial drug called Abulinix, which is supposed to cure indecisiveness.

Boy, I wouldn't take some untested pill for all the dough in the world - I really wouldn't. And you'd think that old Dwight might have second thoughts about it too, given that he and his friends took Ecstasy in the early hours of 9/11 - a very ironical act that made him feel way optimistic, before those buildings came crashing down and made him feel like a moron for having felt so happy just a few hours before.

But hey, Dwight and his friends have spent the better part of their lives getting these chemical assists, and I've gotta say that Dwight (or this Mr. Kunkel, who turns out to be pretty great at channeling old Dwight's thoughts) does a swell job of describing what it's like to be high - on weed or Ecstasy or this South American hallucinogen that makes everyone puke their guts out before transporting them to nirvana or whatever you want to call Drug Heaven. This drug Dwight takes in Ecuador gives a new meaning to stream-of-consciousness narration that old James Joyce certainly never, ever envisioned.

Anyway, Dwight is hoping this trip to Ecuador will change his life, and in a way it does. Natasha bails on him, but this friend of hers, a nice-looking chick named Brigid, is happy to become his traveling companion, and of course, as things go in stories of this sort, the two of them get into some serious "romantico-sexual" action while tripping their brains out in the heart of the Ecuadorean jungle.

I'm not sure that I entirely buy the ending of Dwight's trip, which I won't give away here, in case you want to read the book yourself. I actually think Dwight or Mr. Kunkel might have taken a few artistic liberties with it, seeing that it reads more like something my brother might have written for the movies than a real-life experience.

Old Dwight's book really knocked me out, and if there's one thing I hate, it's Hollywood. But then Dwight - who doesn't have as big a thing about phonies as I do - might not mind selling his story to some producer. He might not even mind being played by Jake Gyllenhaal or Josh Hartnett or Topher Grace.