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Usually, when I re-read books about which I formed an opinion in my teen years, my (ahem) mature assessment is very different, because my teenage self was an idiot. Sometimes the re-read is a disappointment (Robert E. Howard, John A. Keel); others are complete revelations (F. Scott Fitzgerald).
With my thirty-years-later re-visit of The Catcher in the Rye, though, my young self and my old self are in complete agreement:
“What’s the big deal?”
I mean, yes, it’s well written as far as it goes — Salinger consistently affects the first-person voice of a clueless, inconsistent, self-delusional teenage nobody. But is that really all that commendable? I mean, Stephenie Meyer did just as well on the first-person voice of an intelligent but clueless teen in Twilight, and i don’t see that on the curricula for many high schools.
Which, I think, points to why this book has been inflicted on high school students for decades: not because it’s great literature — not even great twentieth-century literature, in which so much academic praise was reserve for work which consciously opposed the standards espoused for great literature of previous centuries — but because it’s a nail that lends itself well to the hammer of high school teaching methods. Wanna talk about self-deceptive narrators? Go on and on about Holden’s reluctance to call Jane and what it really means! Wanna tease out symbolism and point it out to students? There’s a minor character whose initials are J.C. — and he dies!
What makes this more disappointing for me is that I had thought of a great title for a mash-up novel — “H.P. Salinger’s The Lurker in the Rye” — and my re-read was to see what parts or themes of the novel I could adapt to a coming-of-age tale set in Arkham. My disappoint on re-visiting The Catcher in the Rye is to see that, frankly, there’s nothing there. Not just for me to build on; there’s nothing there, period.
Or, as a contemporary critic of Salinger opined on this novel before it was branded an unchallenged lit classic, “That’s not writing; that’s typing.”
[cross-posted to Goodreads]
‘Or, as a contemporary critic of Salinger opined on this novel before it was branded an unchallenged lit classic, “That’s not writing; that’s typing.”’
I think that was Truman Capote writing about Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ (another overrated classic).
I’ve only read Catcher once and even when I was 16 I couldn’t see why it was supposed to be a big deal. I was further mystified when I later learned that this thin, little novel created a cult around J.D. Sallinger, who never went on to publish anything else in his lifetime. If this novel was another Moby Dick or Gravity’s Rainbow I could understand the fascination but, really, “where’s the beef”?
Didn’t read it. We were given choices as to which “classic” we should read, and I chose something else.
I think that, because it was published in 1951, it got caught up in a lot of post-war, baby boomer hype. As such it became the standard for “modern day” (as opposed to the Victorian Era stuff that preceded it) coming of age stories. So while there are better stories that have come out since, it has been so over-analyzed that it has become a standard for the coming of age genre.
It may take another 20-30 years before it gets dropped from high school curricula.
But I love the “H.P. Salinger’s The Lurker in the Rye” concept. 🙂