Jesus, I hated this book in high school. I loathed every single minute I spent reading what I thought was this festering turd of a book- vastly overrated piece of neo-hippy trash that spoke in precisely no way whatsoever towards my experience as a teenager at the type. Overly hyped, I thought. Holden Caulfield? What a whiny little bitch, I thought. Plus: who pays for a prostitute and then talks to her and cries a bunch before running away? (That's what I thought at the time: I don't have a secret life involving prostitutes. Sickos. Besides, I was like 16 and desperate for any kind of gratuitous nudity/sex just to make what was an unbearable book just a little more bearable.)
It's probably been about a decade since I last touched the thing, a casualty of American Literature in 11th Grade. I don't know: I guess when your teacher raves about how much a book might 'speak to you' you tend to expect to have your mind blown. Mine was most definately not blown back then- and I was, as you might have guessed, a little bitter about it.
So, brace yourselves everbody. Are you braced? Good. Because: I was wrong about this book.
I could say something about the shallow, meaningless cultural drivel that seems to make life so empty and superficial pretty much most of the time, but I won't. Needless to say, at 28 I found Holden to be far, far less annoying than I did when I was 16. Partially, I think, because time has proven him somewhat correct and damn, though I hate to admit it, I think Catcher is one of those book where every generation could read it and find something completely different that speaks to their struggle to figure it all out- however trite a sentiment that might sound.
Holden is correct though: a lot of people are completely phony. Superficiality and bullshit is everywhere to be found in America today. (In a weird tangent: could I just say I have never been so happy than I was when I saw a clip of Beavis and Butthead taking the piss out of Jersey Shore. Welcome back, boys: America has missed you.)
I also found myself sympathizing with his general sense of emptiness and despair about life. What is the point of the education system? Holden gets kicked out of school after school and you get the feeling that he's pretty resentful about being expected to go to a, b, c, get a job, married, kids, house- the prototypical suburban existance. Part of you wants to tell him to grow up a little bit, but part of you gets where he's coming from. When you're young and people expect you to act a certain way, you're initially going to want to resist- and failing that you're going to want to try and think outside the box a little bit. After all, you only get one life- you're going to want a little more than the mundane. Even if only for a fleeting moment.
But Holden also takes a bit of a left turn down crazy lane: towards the end of the book he starts dropping broad hints that he's now living in a mental hospital- and it's pretty obvious his mental state deteriorates throughout the course of the book. He has this odd fantasy about being a 'catcher in the rye' saving children from wandering too close to the edge of a cliff- he wants to save them from losing their innocence, which is impossible really, as all children have to grow up. Holden apparently can't handle that notion all that well, hence his crack-up.
After he's kicked out of the latest school, he drifts back to New York, looks up an old girlfriend whom he alienates and pisses off. Drinks with an acquaintance who tells him to see a shrink and finally goes to crash with a teacher he knew from a former school only to find the teacher getting drunk and possibly making a sexual advance towards him. Needless to say: the guy has a busy few days- but ultimately, it's his sister that pulls him back from the brink.
And that's the odd thing to me. His relationship with his sister, Phoebe (which is a lot less creepy than I remember- I seem to remember thinking it was slightly incestuous. How I got incest out of it is beyond me, so go figure.) Phoebe to me proves to be the ying to Holden's yang- he feels like dying at several points throughout the book, but couldn't do that to her- at the end, it's the realization that he can't protect his sister from the world that forces him to get help. In fact, it seems to be a general desire to make his sister happy that motivates a lot of what Holden does. If he is the cynical anti-hero at the heart of the book, Phoebe is the true hero, because it's she, whether she knows it or not that helps Holden push beyond his depression and move forward with his life.
Overall: All right, all right- fine. Better than I remembered, OK? And yes, the writing is amazingly good (better than I remembered) and I get it. Maybe I didn't get it as a teenager, but I can at least sympathize with Holden now. And that's a big step for me...
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