The Catcher in the Rye is a sort of journal-entry-style novel spanning two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, after he is expelled from school. Holden runs away before he was meant to go home and spends those two days in shady hotels and pubs reflecting on his past and future. The novel highlights the contrast between the innocence of young children (as represented by Holden’s little sister Phoebe) and the “phoniness” of grown-ups and the adult world generally.
My opinion of this book changed a lot while I was reading it, and it’s changing now as I’m thinking and writing about it. I feel like it’s the sort of book you’re supposed to love at my age: you’re meant to want to be best friends with Holden; you’re meant to feel like no one but Holden understands the world like you do; you’re meant to want to run away because there aren’t actually any Holdens in the real world. But I couldn’t help feeling – and perhaps this is partly my own teenage cynicism taking over – that literally every teenager in the world is a Holden just for thinking like that. There are too many Holdens. And Holden needs to get a grip anyway.
I was reading a review just now in which someone made a very clever comparison between Holden Caulfield of this book and Pip Pirrip of Great Expectations – both Bildungsroman books, both with characters facing similar issues. But where defeatist Holden Caulfield moodily labels everyone a “phony”, Pip Pirrip looks on his younger self amusedly, accepting through wiser eyes his own youthful phoniness. Where Holden drowns his angst in alcohol, Pip observes, and learns, and grows. Holden doesn’t appear to learn anything from anything. I wouldn’t want to be friends with him in real life. I think I would find him completely insufferable.
But perhaps this is Salinger’s point – that Holden is the hypocrite he can’t stand, that he is effectively every teenager out there who reads this book and thinks, “Oh, woe is me and Holden and nobody else because they don’t see things the way we do.” If that is his point, it seems to me a messy and poorly constructed one. Besides, it’s only first world teenagers who could look at Holden’s plight and feel like they relate to it. That we can sit on our comfy sofas in our nice safe houses and feel so hard done by, like Holden does, speaks for itself.
Perhaps I’m taking it too seriously. But I only feel like I can do that because Catcher in the Rye presents itself so seriously – Salinger writes like he knows his book is going to be so successful, which, surely, is just phony in itself.
But I don’t want to go on just about the reasons I disliked it. Catcher in the Rye is certainly not without its merits. I wasn’t expecting the ending or indeed any of the plot twists throughout. I didn’t find it predictable, I had no idea where the story was going (in a good way). And I liked the layers of storyline that make you wonder, as you pick them up often chapters after they were first hinted at, whether you’ve still missed anything. I thought the mystery shrouding Holden’s uncertain past – the hints at the sexual abuse he experienced as a child and possibly even during the two days the book focuses on, the mystery surrounding the fates of his various schoolmates, the museum as a symbol representing Holden’s ideal world – were all good writing devices, especially when put into the context of a first-person perspective where it’s clear Holden is trying to cover certain things up.
So yes, to an extent, I can relate to Holden perfectly. He does identify some genuine examples of ‘phoniness’ in the adult world, like his description of the brochure advertising his school, “always showing some hotshot guy on a horse jumping over a fence… I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place.” Holden does genuinely feel oppressed by the weight of thinking differently in a time where everyone seems to think the same. He sees through the narcissism of the people around him and finds himself completely unable to cope. But Holden himself comes across as just as self-absorbed – this idea of discovering oneself, of figuring out what it means to be a teenager, is a relatively modern phenomenon. Holden needs to understand that this is the way the world works, he needs to be able to laugh off the phoniness and not take it all so seriously.