by J.D. Salinger
Bona fide classic featuring modern literature's most famous brat as he
apathetically wends himself through New York City
Reviewed by: G-Lock
About G-Lock
Millions of former high school students can't be wrong, can they? Ask
any random sampling of people what their favorite book is, and invariably
someone will mention CATCHER IN THE RYE. It's one of the few books, along
with THE GREAT GATSBY and THE LORD OF THE FLIES, that adults fondly remember
from their bygone educations. And although I'm not exactly sure if I read
CATCHER in high school or merely (ahem) substituted the Cliff's Notes, I do
know that CATCHER was one of my favorites books to discuss. And picking it
up again recently, I see why it resonates long after it's digested.
Holden Caulfield isn't your usual protagonist. He drinks and smokes and
cusses "like a madman." He's rude. He's cranky. He's spoiled. He's not
terribly well-spoken. You might even call him aimless. And therein lies the
crux of Salinger's impeccably true novel. Holden acts as narrator and begins
the story by announcing that he's been kicked out of yet another prep school.
Before he shamefully returns home for the holidays, however, he decides to
treat himself to a little "alone time" in New York City. Self-sufficient (or
is he?) Holden hits the rails after a few telling run-ins with his dormmates,
and the reader is almost immediately treated to his precocious behavior.
When he sits next to a disliked classmate's mother on the train, the
conversation she strikes up veers toward her son. Holden tells her that her
son needs to take things "a little more seriously"; meanwhile, he tells us,
the readers, that her son was "doubtless the biggest bastard that ever went
to Pencey, in the whole crumby history of the school."
Holden's travails in New York are not dated anecdotes as I had dreaded.
Sure, some of the language is antiquated and the scenery of Manhattan may
have changed a bit, but Holden's attitudes and opinions, and the insight we
glean from them, are very contemporary, if not completely timeless. Staying
at hotels and dropping in on bars and clubs doesn't pan out to be the
ultimate vacation for our vagabond. Opinionated cabdrivers, pushy pimps,
estranged flames, and drunken "sophisticates" figure into the mix and fuel
his uncensored internal tirades and outwardly crude interactions. Of a
schmoozy patron at a bar, Holden says, "Some guy next to me was snowing hell
out of the babe he was with. He kept telling her she had aristocratic hands.
That killed me." Holden, pardon my French, cuts the crap.
Silly put-downs aside, why is CATCHER such a favorite? The promise of
growth? Holden perhaps comes of age as he meanders, but not in a cloying
manner. The heart of the book, what is so endearing about this clueless mess
in his arrested development, making fun of everyone and everything, is that
Holden never strays far from home. His wild adventures, keep in mind, are
only within the confines of a few miles of the city, a city he knows like the
back of his hand. In fact, amid his carousing, he sneaks into his family's
house to reconnect with his adored and similarly bright little sister,
Phoebe. Holden's book-long clamor to rebel and break free and appear the
bigshot are tempered by the fact that he has, when all is said and done,
gravitated back to his roots.
The title derives from what Holden tells Phoebe he'd imagine his ideal
self to be when he grows up. The passage encapsulates the frustration and
deep-rooted good intentions of this flawed, confused, sadly recognizable
young man: " ... I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in
this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around
-- nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some
crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to
go over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where
they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all
I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's
crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
Crazy? Perhaps. The voice of generations to come? Definitely.
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: The Catcher in the Rye
Copyright © by G-Lock, 2002
Reviewed by G-Lock :
-- The Corrections
- by Jonathan Franzen
-- Naked
- by David Sedaris
-- The Epic of New York City
- by Edward Robb Ellis
-- The Catcher in the Rye
- by J.D. Salinger
-- The Great Gatsby
- by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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