Catcher In The Rye

[Satchmo Distel]

I'd welcome your thoughts on this massively popular novel.

I loved this when I was 19 but don't really want to go back into the mind of Holden Caulfield. There's a theory that Salinger didn't mean the character to be a role model but the HBO documentary on him refutes that with interviews with those who knew him. Salinger carried the Holden project with him during his wartime service and it's hard to avoid concluding that Seymour Glass, who is definitely a role model, is the adult Holden.

I think the novel ultimately loses value as an adult because it's useless as a guide to surviving the adult world. It's really about despair, but dressed in a fantasy about saving kids from dropping off the cliff. On the other hand maybe it's a gateway to better novels like those of Dostoevsky?

[imp]

I think we've discussed this book a few times over the years, and there's quite a hostile body of opinion about it on OTF. I read it in two sessions (with six hours of sleep in between) when I was 18 after finding it on my dad's bookshelf during the winter holidays in my first year at university - the Lanarkshire countryside allowed you that kind of leisure. I was besotted with it and went on about it for years. It's a poignant, poetic and very funny handbook for adrift adolescents, and it helped me square my confusion and insecurity with the shitty, aggressive, deeply unpleasant world of 1980s Thatcherite Britain. The second time I read it, not long afterwards, I took more time. I still loved it. A few years later, maybe a decade or so, not so much. Anything else I've read by him perplexed or bored me. I think there's a thread on here about Salinger as a person, and how that might put you off reading anything by him ever again. I think CITR is a one-of-a-kind work of absolute genius, and it doomed Salinger's writing career for that very reason.

My eldest daughter, a keen reader with twice my intellect, absolutely hated it.

[slackster]

I certainly loved it as a teen, but daren’t read it again now in case my warm but hazy memories of it are soured by middle-aged reappraisal.

[Hot Pepsi]

For some reason, it wasn’t in our school’s curriculum and I didn’t read it until my late 20s.

I didn’t understand what the fuss was about then. It just seemed like a kid pointing out that private schools - I believe it was based on The Hill School in Pottstown, PA - are awful and abusive. Or, at least, they were in the 50s. That felt like well-trod ground by that point.

But then I read something about how it's really the story of PTSD. Holden sees that kid die. And it reflects Salinger's trauma from the war.

I barely noticed that part of the story when I read it, so perhaps I should read it again with that in mind. That's a much more interesting story than one about a kid who's realizing that adults are full of shit.

[Greenlander]

My mum gave me the book when I was sixteen as a right of passage thing and I have to admit that I was quite taken by it though I'm not sure I ever wanted to be Holden or even really found him likeable even back then.

The battered copy still sits on my main bookshelf though I haven't given it that much thought as I've got older. That was until just last week when it got referenced Mrs G's favourite Gilmore Girls so I got it down and gave it a skim through.It's certainly compelling and I can see why teenage me enjoyed it but Satchmo's point stands in that it loses much read through adult eyes. I enjoyed the relationship with his little sister, Phoebe, though.

[Greenlander]

Apparently it has been simultaneously the most read and also the most challenged or censored book in the American school system.

[Satchmo Distel]

The first publisher that Salinger tried to interest turned it down. 'Bastard' was probably challenging for schools in 1951 but there were undoubtedly books with the n-word that schools thought were fine. It also raises the question about the ideal age at which to read it: 19 is probably the upper limit but what's the lower: 13, 14?

[Greenlander]

I'm pretty certain I was 16, maybe 15 and I'm not sure I'd suggest going any lower. I suggested it to young Greenlander a couple of years back when he was 18/19 but he'd already read it and wasn't a fan thinking Caulfield a bit of a dick all told.

Maybe it really is a book for the 20th century.

[Patrick Thistle]

I got obsessed by Salinger a few years ago. But I talked about that on the Salinger thread.

He was clearly traumatised by his wartime experience including covering up the mass deaths in a training exercise at Slapton Sands in Devon.

If you don't like Catcher in the Rye then fair enough. I'm not interested why.

[Hot Pepsi]

I read Franny and Zoey in school, but recall nothing about it. Was it good?

I saw that documentary in JDS a while back. It was a bit too long and just kind of made him
look like an asshole. It didn’t illuminate much.

[Patrick Thistle]

Franny & Zooey is one of those books where nothing happens to remember. It's a similar vein to Catcher, in that one of the characters is on the brink of madness and their sibling brings them back.

[ursus arctos]

It is pretty much of a right of passage for a certain kind of white straight male New Yorker to go through a period when he identifies intensely with Holden and mopes around the park and other "iconic" locations.

I wasn't any different in this respect and likely had it worse than most.

The book almost certainly doesn't hold up to those memories, but then little of adolescence does.

ursus minor hated it, which in some ways reflects his rather negative view of his hometown, but also made me reluctant to read it again.

I think it is widely accepted both that his short stories were his most important work and that he was a profoundly difficult human being.

[Hot Pepsi]

Just reading up on it a bit, I was struck that it was published in 1951. Somehow I had it in my mind that it was about 10 years later.

I can see how it would have stood out at that time and become very influential. But by the 90s, or perhaps earlier, angry teenagers weren’t so hard to find in popular culture or literature. Indeed, they’d become a sitcom cliche, so it may be hard for kids now to imagine what it would be like to read it in the 50s. I suppose the same is true for the Beat writers, but I still really like Kerouac’s style.

[Patrick Thistle]

Next year Catcher will have been in print 70 years. We can have a decent discussion about it's style and impact, whether it was overblown, etc. But very few books stay in print for 70 years.

It's a good way of identifying phoneys, asking for a person's opinion of Catcher in the Rye. If you need to spot a hipster poser, it will find them out.

[Hot Pepsi]

Who is making money off of it now? The daughter who wrote a scathing biography or the son who was in that low-budget first attempt to make a Captain America film in 1990? I guess it’s the latter.


Here’s a nice essay on this topic.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...lden-caulfield

[ursus arctos]

The estate is run jointly by the son and his JD's third wife (who was born 40 years after he was).

[Hot Pepsi]

Oh that’s right. I remember that from that documentary.

[Sporting]

I think it is widely accepted both that his short stories were his most important work

That may be true, but I found them insufferably tedious after Rye.

[ursus arctos]

Almost as minority a view as not calling the novel Catcher

Though one you are of course completely entitled to hold

[ad hoc]

I read Catcher in the Rye 3 times as a teenager. The last in one sitting while smoking two joints alone in my student room. That night was the closest I ever came to attempting suicide (and there have been a few close shaves over the years).

I haven't touched it since (not because I imagine it will have the same effect now but because I... Well it's just not something I want to revisit)

[Sporting]

Like most of us I read CITR as a teenager, loved it, but have never returned to it. I suppose I may have been too young to appreciate his other works, probably because I was expecting more of the same.

Almost as minority a view as not calling the novel Catcher

Remember that "most important" doesn't always equate to "what is subjectively most enjoyable".

[ursus arctos]

"Enjoyable" is never a word I associated with Salinger

Thurber is enjoyable

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

As a Dickens fan, I took against HC from the very opening lines.

[Various Artist]

Just reading up on it a bit, I was struck that it was published in 1951. Somehow I had it in my mind that it was about 10 years later.

I can see how it would have stood out at that time and become very influential. But by the 90s, or perhaps earlier, angry teenagers weren’t so hard to find in popular culture or literature. Indeed, they’d become a sitcom cliche, so it may be hard for kids now to imagine what it would be like to read it in the 50s. I suppose the same is true for the Beat writers, but I still really like Kerouac’s style.

I hadn't realised it was of quite such vintage either. "Teenagers" as such hadn't even really been invented when it was published, so I can well imagine it stood out like a sore thumb at the time.


It's just one of many, many classic novels that I've never read – I don't think it was on my high school's English syllabus at all – and have only ever had the vaguest intention of doing so. At 41 now, is there any point in me visiting it for the first time, given all that's commonly said about it needing to be a book you read for the first (or only) time as a teenager?


Oh, and since this is a literary thread after all, yet the phrase has been mangled twice herein, may I gently point out it's 'rite of passage'? _(sorry)

[Satchmo Distel]

I agree with Ursus about the short stories. The documentary shows that he submitted a much larger number than were ever published so what you get in 'Nine Stories'* is the peak of a very laborious process.

*aka. 'For Esme With Love and Squalor' in the edition I read in 1985.