I speculate that the coverage for this is going to boil down to I Liked Catcher In The Rye/I Did Not Like Catcher In The Rye. So a few thoughts here on why a) you’re wrong not to like it and b) JD Salinger was way more important than one book.
The standard view on Catcher is that it’s some mopey teen wandering around being angsty. This polarises people: his worldview resonates with an awful lot of readers, particularly adolescents, but everyone else just wishes he’d cowboy up. The debate never seems to go deeper than that, which is a crying shame, because there’s way more going on in the novel.
Firstly, Holden’s mopiness isn’t just Gawd-no-one-understands-me angst. There’s a line near the start where he says1 “Sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen”. Holden was thirteen when his brother Allie died; his brother, whom he adored, placed at the absolute centre of his universe. Allie’s death destroys Holden and, though he never confronts it head on, the entire novel details his attempts to come to terms with it.
Secondly, despite what many people seem to think, we’re not supposed to see Holden as a role model. Arrested development is not something to aspire to. All-encompassing cynicism is not something to aspire to. If there’s a how-are-we-to-live message in Salinger’s writing, it’s that no matter how hard it might be, the best thing we can do is find a way to get outside ourselves, stop acting like everything is about us, and keep moving forward. There’s an excellent distillation of this in the second part of Franny & Zooey. Or, more conveniently, you could read this speech by David Foster Wallace, who was heavily inspired by Salinger.
At the risk of turning into a wild-eyed evangelist, I think it’s a tragedy that Holden Caulfield is the only one of Salinger’s narrative voices that most people are familiar with. He’s dour and self-absorbed and I can see why you might not like him, whereas Salinger’s writing as a whole is characterised by a genuine warmth and humour that most writers couldn’t even approach. His short stories are phenomenal (see for instance the title story in For Esme, With Love & Squalor). He can do this thing where, in about four or five words, he describes a gesture or facial expression so perfectly that a character’s entire history, state of mind and motivations are dumped directly into your brain.
Ok, wild-eyed evangelist. Breathe.
Right now I’m going to read over these two letters a few times (the latter being some of the best writing advice ever dispensed). Then I’m going to go home and read the books again. Then I’m going to wait for all the manuscripts he’s finished since he retired from publishing to surface. And then… I don’t know what I’ll do.
- I’ve no copy to hand, so I’m quoting from memory. [↩]
Recent Comments