Will I love The Catcher in the Rye?

For years, I refused to re-embrace Holden Caulfield, because Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin, declared it inspired him to bloodshed. I’m glad I did, getting the juices circulating for my novel.

Holden, manic-depressed over his brother’s death, cut loose from his prep school, may speak in a stream-of-consciousness babble, but he enunciated an old-soul contempt of Ivy-League elitism that reverberates today.

When Holden declares, “The more expensive a school, the more crooks it has,” it’s a literary MRI on American classism still tearing us asunder.

Some feel this coming-of-age doesn’t age well, but for me, it continues to be the seminal introduction and invitation to New York City and its enduring, angsty allure.

Reading it as a young person, I felt I’d made a friend in Holden; his animosity, his righteous indignation, and his exceptional love for his sister all struck me as provocative and enviable. I wished I could have an adventure like his, and I carried him with me.

Re-reading it over the years, living in New York and then leaving it again, I concede there are parts that feel dated and mildly… show more.

Despite being written in the 1940s, the ideas in this book remain important today.

This is particularly true in discussions about mental health, generational differences, and the search for meaning in a world still haunted by memories of The Great Depression, WWII, and the Korean War that was still raging. 

The main character, Holden Caulfield, is a sixteen-year-old high school junior who is expelled from a fancy prep school because he failed all his classes. But he is not dumb, in fact, far from it. His quirky personality, his flaws, and his capacity for empathy and compassion make him an… show more.

I'm not unashamed to say that I discovered J.D. Salinger through the show Bojack Horseman, and had never read Holden Caulfield's journey. It resonates even more when having a teenage kid around. It's one of those books—like Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces—that proves great literature doesn’t always need to be ultra-serious.

So what if his worldview never makes sense to anyone but himself? I see Holden Caulfield as the quintessential benchmark for a bad boy, shucking off the last few days at the boarding school that expelled him to wander around Manhattan in a daze. Some readers don’t like him so much that they are personally invested in attacking him and what he represents. 

But what is it that he represents, exactly? When I look beyond the surface of his false bravado, he’s a character deeply affected by the death of his brother and is setting out on a quest to… show more.

I have read this book repeatedly in my life, the first time as a high school junior and the most recent time as I entered my thirties, and every time, I understand the plight of Holden Caulfield a little bit better.

Poorly attached to his family (who mostly ignore him), poorly attached to his friends (who change as often as he changes boarding schools), and still grieving for the loss of his brother, Holden attempts to take on life independently in Manhattan, of all places, with predictably disastrous results.

As someone who lived in four different states and had five… show more.

This is a compulsive first-person account of the plight of Holden Caulfield, an awkward adolescent, just expelled from his private boarding school, who is shyly trying to find sex and love while pursuing a personal crusade against adult hypocrisy. (His favourite put-down is “phony”).

I read it first as a teenager in South Africa and felt an immediate kinship with Holden, a Tom Sawyer for our times, who was standing up for himself against the idiocies of the grown-ups.

Salinger broke a lot of unspoken rules of fiction-writing–and thus life–with Catcher. It was emotionally cauterizing for me as a teenager while incessantly trying, and failing, at learning rules adults apparently didn’t want us to know.

I’m certain many of my contemporaries identified with Holden Caulfield’s stream-of-consciousness introspection as deeply as I did. And when I think back about it, I find myself once again in the grip of how it was: ferreting out how life works but getting no guidance from parents, teachers, or bosses, only the terror of making mistake after mistake until the world didn’t make… show more.

I was 12 or 13 when I first read The Catcher in the Rye and I was gobsmacked.

It’s a work of fiction but it was obviously autobiographical because it was so intimately detailed and genuinely rendered. It was like eavesdropping on someone’s psychiatric sessions, the narrative of a patient who holds nothing back from his doctor.

In Holden’s voice I heard so much of myself including a contempt for phoniness as well as a reluctance to enter adulthood. Holden doesn’t hold back on embarrassing details: an encounter with a prostitute and her pimp that goes wrong, and just before… show more.

Holden Caulfield’s sardonic, world-weary teenage voice grabbed me when I first read this book in preparation for teaching it to a class of boys.

He makes out he doesn’t really want to tell his story. Take it or leave it. He doesn’t care. Reverse psychology! I wanted to read on and find out what had gone wrong in his world to cause his cynicism.

My teenage students, during our lessons, raged at Holden, hated him, laughed at him, envied him, loved him, and felt for him as we tracked his progress in Manhattan where he pretends to be adult and… show more.