Catcher In The Rye's Embarrassment
It’s Why Salinger Stopped Publishing
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When I first read Catcher in the Rye in high school, I didn’t like it. It’s not that I was forced to read it to pass the class. Unlike Holden Caulfield, who would have put it down and found something else to do, I finished it.
Holden is a hulking six-foot-two sixteen-year-old bouncing from one preparatory school to another, unable to apply himself to his studies. He doesn’t like phonies, considers himself an outcast from his peers. Over the course of a long weekend back in NYC, he deals with isolation, not measuring up to his parents’ expectations, sexual frustrations, and grief over a death. Not to mention a number of little challenges littering the way, the kind of suffering literary audiences yearn for.
The book has sold millions of copies, been assigned to read to millions. These days, when high schoolers are allowed to choose between Catcher and other books, they’ll ignore Catcher.
When I read it again recently for book club, I didn’t like it for the same reasons as my younger self. The story begins:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood is like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
He’s been expelled, but before he leaves, he visits one of his teachers, Spencer, to say good-bye. Spencer uses the visit for one last conversation, teacher to student.
“I flunked you in history because you knew absolutely nothing.”
“I know that, sir. Boy, I know it. You couldn’t help it.”
“Absolutely nothing,” he said over again. That’s something that drives me crazy. When people say something twice that way, after you admit it the first time. Then he said it three times. “But absolutely nothing. I doubt very much if you opened your textbook even once the whole term. Did you? Tell the truth, boy.”
“Well, I sort of glanced through it a couple of times,” I told him. He was mad about history.
Nobody at book club enjoyed the book, and most asked Why are we reading this?
Authors strive to achieve verisimilitude in their characters so readers engage emotionally. Writing a coming-of-age novel is hard work, as the adult author has left his or her teen years far behind. Writing about a teen brimming with contradictions is even harder. Salinger likely drew from his own prep school experiences in writing the character. Holden is book smart, he’s read the massive David Copperfield, yet he doesn’t read. He’s street smart, yet he has no friends and he’s surprised when Spencer berates him for being lazy. He’s grown beyond his years, yet thinks like a ten-year-old. Maybe it reflects the early fifties, but it all sounds infantile.
When I was the same age as Holden, the phoniness of the character stood out. This most recent go around? I feel even stronger now that I’ve had kids, been around kids, worked with kids, including some who were hurting bad. Including some very long van rides with the same. I’ve seen grief, isolation, thrashing around for their place in the world, rudeness, social deafness, a yearning to be taken seriously, treated as adults, but I haven’t seen a Holden. Teens back in my day and teens of today are young adults, not old children.
Cathy at book club read it in college and came away on this reread as confirming her belief of Holden as superficial. Still though, as Mary astutely noted, our book club went beyond asking Why this book? and engaged in deep discussion of its issues. Perhaps the book was first of its kind in bringing this level of teen troubles to audiences.
Here's a take-away, a stretch, I’ll admit. But it’s what we readers are entitled to do, try to figure things out. After mining the prep school phase of his life in Catcher, Salinger rarely published, stopping about a decade later. He became a publishing recluse, lived in small town New Hampshire, his Catcher probably selling so well he earned a nice income, without feeling pressure to publish more. He was a World War II vet; no telling what impact the war had. His daughter, Margaret, wrote her memoirs about her father. Just what a father wants for Christmas, Daddy, I wrote a tell-all about everything private. As a college student, Joyce Maynard dropped out to live with Salinger, old enough to be her father. She felt he took advantage. Maynard is no slouch; she’s published numerous novels and her memoirs.
Suppose as the royalty checks, instead of stopping, got larger, and Salinger got to thinking. Hard to follow up on expectations, the bar raised so high you have to wonder if you can do it again. Salinger did publish a few more things, post-Catcher, nothing matching sales-wise. In her memoirs, Maynard said Salinger continued to write fiction, accumulating numerous unpublished manuscripts.
Suppose Salinger realized how badly he wrote Caulfield and knew he couldn’t, try as he might, write a character that phony again. Explains his isolation, not measuring up to publishing expectations, conquests of young women.
There are many coming-of age novels with engaging, believable characters. Katniss of The Hunger Games, and Wade of Ready Player One come to mind, as does Tracie of Run Girl Run by
.What coming-of-age novels have you enjoyed?
Authors, feel free to tell us about your own works.
All the Best,
Geoff
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Ah, Holden. He was a triumph when the novel was published. Yes, I am of the age to know that. And, yes, the book was banned in my high school after we read it in English Lit. Do I remember right that, later in his life, Salinger was a recluse? Wonder if mental illness was working its bad ways.
Youre so real for this. I HATED this book the only time I read it, because his problems felt so self inflicted. But I like the lens you brought to it. To make a comparison, there are some old horror films I adore, not because they're particularly good, but they were the first to pilot a new concept in the genre. Obnoxious teen might have been fresh ground, that we've since seen done better and with more sincerity.