Book review: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye has been one of those books that I often thought about reading, but then put it off. I suppose maybe I had to find the right time for when I was in the mood to try it.
I think it was about five or maybe six years ago that someone said, “You shouldn’t read The Catcher in the Rye after you’re out of high school.” Well I hadn’t been in high school for more than a few months before I’d quit, and I supposed I was too old for whatever secrets this book held that was meant only for teenagers of a certain age to understand. So I thought about the book, but I never really thought about reading it.
High school for me was a scary place. Part of it had to do with how I’d always gotten through my previous grades. I never did homework, and I was always flunking and having teachers give me speeches about not applying myself. Then when the year end exam came, I’d ace that damn test and prove that even if I didn’t play along with all the homework, I did read the damn books, and yes, I grasped what I was supposed to get out of them.
I didn’t skip out of homework because I was lazy, either. I had hand pains from normal writing, and despite telling everyone about this, no one ever believed me. It later turned out this was a very early symptom of MS, and had anyone believed me, I might have been diagnosed a lot earlier. But just to get to a doctor back then, I had to practically break a bone. I even took a hammer to the head, fell off the clubhouse we were building, and bled like a stuck pig out of my eyebrow, and all I got was a band aid.
I didn’t like school, to be honest. I didn’t like the bullies, or the teachers always telling me that I must be doing something wrong to get beat up all the time. I had a few teachers I liked, but most of them made me mad for how they ignored kids like me and let us fall through the cracks. So I refused to play along and do homework, and I turned in my tests and watched those lousy teachers stew over my passing test scores.
Before going to high school, the counselor of my junior high said my old tricks wouldn’t work there, and if I didn’t apply myself, by God, I was going to be sorry. So I went in thinking “Well, this is it. I’ve got to change my life and really do some work for a change.” I also decided that if I was stuck in for another four years of school hell, I was going to find somewhere I wanted to belong. So after looking around, I decided where I really wanted to be was with the cheerleaders. I started out buddying up to them, hoping to ask them how to make the squad, but only a few days into this plan, some of the jocks cornered me and told me they would mess me up if I hung out with their girls. And that’s when I decided that I no longer wanted any part of school.
When I talked to the counselor about quitting, I made up other reasons for wanting to leave, and she said that if I did quit, I’d never accomplish anything in my life. As it turned out, I took the GED a year later without studying and passed in the top five percent. I took college entrance exams, also without studying, and I passed everything except math, where I was told I need to take intermediate college algebra. I attended college for a degree in computer graphics, thinking I would learn how to make 3D cartoons. But the crumby old community college I went to thought computer graphics meant making Powerpoint slideshows.
And I’ll tell you a funny thing. I was passing my algebra class, but failing in Drawing 101. Yeah. I was supposed to make ten sketches a day, and after three or so, my hand hurt so bad I couldn’t do anymore. But of course I couldn’t get any sympathy with that old story. After a while, it just depressed me to think how I was passing my math class, but failing in art. The sketches I did make were praised, and yet, I wasn’t making enough to make the grade. I looked at my lousy grades in that class, and I thought about getting a degree in making slideshow presentations, and I said, “Well screw it, I’ll just see what I can do without a college degree.”
It turns out, I can do quite a lot. Over the years, I worked as a PC technician, a webmaster, a network technician, and as a help desk technician. I even got to be a movie projectionist because I had a technical background. For a little while I edited videos for a wrestling federation out of Austin, and they let me be the commissioner and tell these big burly jocks who was going to win and lose. That was a fun job, let me tell you.
Sometimes I want to go back to my old high school and find that counselor still working there. I want to say to her, “You know how you said I’d never amount to anything? Well you were wrong, and I did a whole hell of a lot without your stupid diploma. I live in Milan now, and I have a great husband, and I write novels, and I get paid to edit a magazine. I’ve worked on computers and networks, and I’ve worked on movie projectors. I’ve had a great goddamn life with no thanks to you and your lousy advice, and I don’t think you or these teachers are heroes. I think you’re a sad bunch of shitheads with a government mandated job of programming subservient company cogs.”
This is all a rather roundabout way of saying that I totally get Holden Caulfield. His is a story that despite the differences in our experiences, locations, and time periods, really connects to me. Most of the stories I read about teens are okay, but they all feel like stuff written by adults who want to tell kids how to behave, so they write about kids that are so gosh-doodly-darned clean and innocent that I can’t relate to them. And then there’s Holden; drinking, smoking cigarettes, trying to find some girl to lose his virginity with, and flunking with all his teachers asking why he can’t just apply himself. Oh, hell yes, I can relate to this guy.
I saw some other blurbs and reviews that made me think there was going to be some great coming of age tale in this book, with Holden venturing into the seedy side of New York. But that never happened, and this is really a story about nothing at all. Holden is kicked out of his fancy school, Pencey Prep, for flunking several of his classes, and rather than face his parents, he opts to go out on a misadventure around town. Everywhere he goes, he seems intent to keep burning bridges with old contacts, and even if it is his fault for saying some rotten things, I knew why he was doing it, and I felt sorry for him.
Once I got to the middle of the book and understood there wasn’t going to be any big revelation, I just settled into a pace of reading a few chapters a day, and they depressed me not because of Holden’s antics or his musings. I got depressed thinking how adults lose their perspective on this formative time in their life. I mean, I get why they do. You go from being a teenager yelling “When I grow up, no one is going to tell me what to do!” And then you grow up, and now everyone is telling you what to do. Your boss, your landlord, your bill collectors. You know it isn’t fair, but what else can you do? So you get a job and pay the bills and the rent, and in the process, you lose some of that empathy for what it means to be a teenager. You lose sight of why you were so angry. You forget what it felt like to be powerless and angry at having every single minute of your time dictated by others.
Well I didn’t forget. Maybe it was the multiple head injuries or the constant abuse that have me permanently locked in a teenage mindset, but even after reaching the ripe old age of 39, I have an easier time relating to teenagers than I do to most adults. So even at his angriest, most selfish moments, I understand Holden. I relate to him more readily than a number of YA characters I’ve read in more modern stories, and I think that’s because he feels real. Sure, he can still be viewed a bit like a cautionary tale, but there’s no sense of an adult lecturing through the character about what good girls and boys act like. It feels like a teen telling me about that one time they flunked out and went a little crazy at the prospect of facing their parents over yet another failure to conform. It feels like a story closer to my own life experiences.
And something else that I noticed is, this story has a scene with a trans person having a binging episode. Holden sees them dress up in a gown in their hotel room and walk around smoking and posing in front of a mirror. And yeah, Holden’s calling them a pervert, but how I see this is as a revolutionary scene for literature of the time. You just try to find a trans character in most modern YA. There may be a “safe gay,” the asexual friend with no romantic partner who allows the author to check off a box and say they write with “diversity.” But that’s as far as they go, and trans people don’t even get a mention in these books. Meanwhile, here’s a book published in 1951 showing a trans person binging in a hotel room, an experience I’ve read about multiple times from older transitioners who went through binging and purging phases before accepting themselves and coming out. That’s some brave stuff to talk about in a teen’s book, even if Holden is saying, “ooh, look at this pervert acting freaky.” He’s a teenager in a time when trans people were a very unknown topic. Hell in 1951, Christine Jorgensen was just getting her operation in Denmark. This was written before that, before there was even a trans celebrity in the public spotlight. And now, you can’t find a trans character in most of these YA novels even though there’s a few thousand high school students actively transitioning. Ain’t that a kick in the nuts?
This review is probably already going way too far into TMI, and I realize I’m just supposed to say how angry old Holden is, and he’s just a stupid kid who doesn’t know how hard life will get in the future. But I think I get where he’s coming from because I remember all too well all those speeches about applying myself and needing to amount to something. I remember what it was like not having the first damn clue of what I wanted for myself, and only knowing that I didn’t want to be stuck in a stupid school being told how to think and what to do. I get it, I really do.
So I’m giving The Catcher in the Rye 4 stars. I’m glad I finally read it, and I don’t think you need to read it before you leave high school. But I think if you do read it as an adult, you need to try real hard to remember what it was like being a teenager and being angry at how unfair the world looked from your perspective. Perhaps you just need to be in the right mood to reconnect to your old self first before you can get back to Holden’s mindset.
