In lieu of an actual review for this classic, I'll simply post from another message board where I discussed my current re-read of it, specifically the fact that so many people despise it for one reason or another:

Having finally given Catcher the time it deserved (I never finished it first time round) I can now honestly say that not appreciating it means you missed the point.

I can see how it could be unlikeable. Holden is an annoying narrator. He vascilates from one opinion to the opposite in the span of a page, he rambles on often, he's got a low tolerance threshhold, and there are times he's just an ass. But, er, that's the point. If you don't like Holden, Salinger did his job.

On the same token, I find it hard to hate Holden, because I see bits of me in him. Less now than when I look back on when I was his age, but I think most teens should be able to relate to Holden, especially male teens. If you can't, you're either incredibly well adjusted, and if that's the case, you lucked out, or you're the sort of person that drives someone to become Holden, jaded by everything before graduating High School, convinced everyone is phony... not that Holden himself isn't phony at times, but every teen is.

The book isn't about events. The events are commonplace. They're supposed to be. It's about the character, and what he says, and to extrapolate, what it means. You could say it's cautionary, that Salinger is laughing at the spoiled rich brat he's writing Holden as, and that we the reader should take it as warning not to become him. We could see it as dystopian, that Salinger was commenting on the shallowness of American culture through the eyes of a child, one well-off enough to both see its most glaring pettiness as well as partake in it's seedier aspects. You could even see it as a bit of a commentary about what really matters... about how even the most cynical teen out there still has something they love (in Holden's case, family). You could even take that a step further, and see it psychologically... what damage a loss like that of Allie could cause in a young mind, etc. There's a lot to look into in The Catcher in the Rye... even the admittedly weak explaination of the title could spark discussion as to what it says about or means in terms of his character.

These are just the impressions I get from it... hardly researched, but then, the best book discussions shouldn't come from research but from your heart. I just think that with many classics, people start looking for something huge... a big, rollicking plot, some amazing humour or poetic language, and sometimes the brilliance of a book is so much more subtle. Not that Holden can't turn a phrase, and certainly not to say that there are times when Holden's sheer contradictory nature jumps the line into humorous, and not even to say there aren't some big and poignant moments in the mundanity (word?) of the plot... simply that in a book like this, even those moneymaker bits are understated.