Playing shortstop for the Catcher in the Rye

I'll make some eggs for this rehash.

So I gave Catcher in the Rye another shot, trying to see it through older eyes. Try doing that yourself some day, it’s harder than you might think. MY initial gut reaction from Catcher was what I posted about a month ago, and several people chimed in that I needed to dig deeper to understand it, and that it held relevance insomuch as being a landmark in American literature, meaning; It was groundbreaking for it’s time, the way the Beatles were one of the most important groups in the 60’s, but you never hear their songs played today on popular radio. It was an important step, and one that I couldn’t see from my vantage point of literary freedom in this day and age.

So, I read it again. And again. Looked up reviews from it’s early publishing, found out where and why it had been banned, the whole nine yards. Even discovered this little tidbit about an incident near my house here in Washington;

"In 1978 parents in Issaquah, Washington, became upset with the rebellious views expressed in the novel by Holden Caulfield and with the profanity he uses. The woman who led the parents' group asserted that she had counted 785 uses of profanity, and she alleged that the philosophy of the book marked it as part of a Communist plot that was gaining a foothold in the schools, 'in which a lot of people are used and may not even be aware of it.' The school board voted to ban the book, but the decision was later reversed when the three members who had voted against the book were recalled due to illegal deal-making.”

Huh. I’ll bet they never read it, or they wouldn’t have bothered banning it.

I won’t rehash the entire post I made two months ago, but I will say this: My opinion hasn’t changed. However, I can explain it better than before, with less cynicism.

The characters surrounding Holden throughout the novel are perfectly crafted to play off his apathetic life, like a long dark corridor leading to a dead end. They are all either out to get him, or just as uncaring as he is and almost none of them give him a good wake-up call. Holden I can imagine as an angst-ridden teenager, but to have every adult he comes into contact with playing the same role seems unrealistic to me. Adults just don't act like that. They certainly don't let their children wander the streets of New York alone. This was the part I found particularly hard to swallow, because even though I have had a good many enemies in the guise of friends, even at my lowest I have always had one or two people in my life who would smack me in the head and at least attempt to put me back on track. None of Holden’s acquaintances do this, save one of his teachers, and this one only briefly.

Holden has a kind of duality in his conscience that lets him believe that his brother is a sellout for writing in Hollywood and not writing poems anymore, but fails to acknowledge that steady work pays the bills. Like eating, or the clothes on his back, or going to the private school he just dropped out of. He is searching for “something beautiful”, as he puts it, but goes to the scummiest place in America to find it, New York. Probably L.A. nowadays, but this was in the 1960’s.

I have met actual people who are as apathetic and uncaring as Holden presents himself. And they disgust me. You probably know one or two yourself, people who drift through life and waste opportunities handed to them on a silver platter. I think the major reason I disliked this book is that I simply can’t accept a life like the one Holden has. He clearly doesn’t care about life or death from one minute to the next, and I can’t stand people who don’t value their own lives

So, I think I mentioned before, the “gotcha” in this book is at the end…Holden is writing from a mental hospital, and doesn’t see anything worth trying to work for. And the finale is a letdown to me in the worst way: Holden has actually had the drippings of an adventure, and hasn’t changed a bit. The Holden we meet at the end of the book is identical to the Holden we met at the beginning. And the message seems to be that if he hasn’t learned a lesson or advanced in life, why should we?

I made light of the use of profanity in the book in the earlier post, and mentioned that it didn’t age well, being cutting edge for the 60’s and ho-hum for 2008. Several people chimed in and said I would have to had been there to fully appreciate the impact it had. Well, on second consideration, it’s interesting that this book was banned for the language and hints of sexual innuendo (no actual sex ever occurs), but the language doesn’t deserve to be at the forefront of discussion because it’s not the language that I find distasteful. In fact, I think it’s nothing but a distraction on the part of the author. In the end, I believe J.D. Salinger is cheating us. I think he took the easy way out and didn’t really tell a story, just got a sociopathic teenager to deliver woe-is-me monologue. I don’t think this book was a difficult scribe, because the pattern is repeated in every chapter: Attempt, fail, brood, discard. (I said that in the previous post as well.)

I want to leave you with a quote from Judith Shulevitz, a columnist at the New York Times, who wrote this about Catcher in the Rye:

"Once Holden's charisma loses its force, once we no longer believe in the purity that made him an exception--all we are left with is the piteous rant of a sad and lonely and somewhat paralyzed boy. We can't hold him or his monologue in the same esteem, because we sense that to do so is to accept life on his constrictingly simplistic terms.
We have, thank goodness, moved on."

Thank goodness, we have indeed.