In Which I Review Catcher in the Rye...Not What I Was Expecting

By Little, Brown, and Company

Catcher in the Rye, like Peter Pan, addresses the fear and insecurity of growing up, but whereas one encapsulates this inside an adventure/ fantasy romp, the other does so via vivid, psychological realism, dare I say set in 1940s New York, even if published in 1951. “The trouble behind picket fences” stories were emerging, “Death of a Salesman,” just came out and American writers were increasingly addressing themes of alienation and dissatisfaction in their stories, and this work by J. D. Salinger is a key contributor to that movement.

In it, his his hero, Holden Caulfield, a privileged white kid whose family could afford a maid as well as his private school, flunks out and goes AWOL in New York, restless, and unsure of his next move.  

Holden is highly intelligent and not particularly rebellious, just disaffected, mostly.   He’s not lazy, either, just bored and emotionally isolated.  He’s not very likable, but over time Holden just grows on me, given we start to see just how emotionally troubled the poor kid is.  

Upon reading this, I cannot help but reflection how times have changed.

People seem to keep getting jaded younger and younger, and this novel, being ahead of the curve, naturally caters to that, but at the same time, this dissatisfaction, largely prefiguring that vaunted mid-sixties cloudburst, was  largely directed at adults, whereas now, it’s more nebulous.

Society may have altered, but still this post-modern angst, as it is now known, still persists even as it is now no longer so tightly associated with rebellion.  As embodied on Girls, this sense of frustration is still blamed on parental issues, but given the parents’ world views are largely the same as was not the case in the fifties and sixties, this now-classic disconnect has lost almost all its revolutionary bite.

In any case, I just get a kick out of Holden’s tendency to call people “old” simply to distance himself.   “Old Sally”—the closest thing Holden has to a girlfriend, and Phoebe—Holden's sister—are basically my two favorite characters in the whole blame novel.  In particular I like the scene where he calls Sally up drunk; says a ton about his emotional state, right there—both funny and depressingly sad.

Holden suffers from disillusionment, and thus his dream which he relates to Phoebe is to protect other children from that selfsame disillusioning, and thus his idealism arises from his cynical ashes, a wish which is later touchingly demonstrated when he convinces her not to run away with him.  He is basically expressing a wish to self-parent himself, whilst at the same time lacking role models he wants to emulate—that’s his biggest problem.

That one teacher, with whom he spends much of a night with comes closest, though.    Trouble is, when that teach starts getting a mite too familiar with him—dare I say fatherly—running his fingers through the boy’s hair just before he wakes up during the night—Holden turns skittish, rationalizing it with what today would be denigrated as “homophobia” and leaves.   Holden duly fears getting  close to others, and not  without reason, given his brother died, and a classmate killed himself, but those are probably just contributing factors to his depressing, and not the cause; at bottom he’s an an idiosyncratic snob reacting to trauma and pain and not doing very good job given he’s so very isolated from quite a loving family, but I think that’s pretty much par for the course, at his age.

 At the end of the day I found this book more insightful than I did enjoyable, more for elitist discussion than people who want to casually consume literature, but this is like just me, talking.  In any event I would not recommend this book to anyone; it my be well-written, but it’s about themes I’m not interested in, attitudes I do not endorse, and thus I simply shrug and say you should just leave it on the shelf.  Holden Caulfield isn’t annoying enough to hate, but he is just punk enough to ignore.