Author: J.D. Salinger
Genre: Classics, Historical Fiction, Coming of Age, YA
Publication date: July 16, 1951
Book description: It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...
Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.
The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.
Thoughts:
This is a very character-driven story and follows an unlikable character. I found Holden to be a whinny annoying, self-centered young man. This is unfortunately not for me. We have been inundated with teen angst everywhere in the last couple of years be it music, movies, tv series, etc. So by now, I'm a bit tired of it.
I'm sure the target audience will receive the book so much better.
I see why this story has been a classic, and in some cases, mostly in US, it's a book that teenagers are having as part of their compulsory reading.
Holden's "annoying", "pseudo rebellious" and "just don't care" exterior were obviously manufactured to hide a seriously sad and lost boy trying to find himself. The way Salinger writes is brilliant. He decided to write in Holden's words, slang, bad grammar, and spelling mistakes to try to get you into the teenager's head. It's a very bold style. It annoyed the heck out of me, but I see the reasoning behind it.
Caulfield is lazy, stubborn, immature, unfocused, untruthful, rude, discourteous, and uninterested in education. He is dangerously short-sighted and he is lost in his own world or unrealistic expectations. This is why is meant to have such high reliability, it sounds like the abyss of uncertainty that any teenage boy will find themselves on. But I still dislike it.
There is no plot at all, we just follow a young man who thinks he's oh-so-special and has so many insights on life that it ends up with him being misunderstood by everyone. In reality, he's a stupid kid who has no experience in life and therefore is a loser by his own standards.
It all boils down to either you identify with Holden Caulfield or you don't. For those in the first category, in Holden they see a misunderstood warrior-poet, fighting the good fight against a hypocritical and unfeeling world; they see in Salinger a genius because he gets it, and he managed to put it into words with such 'clarity'.
Those of us who don't relate to Holden see in him a self-absorbed whiner, and in Salinger, a one-trick-pony who lucked into performing his trick at a time when a large fraction of America happened to be in the right collective frame of mind to perceive this boring nonsense as revolutionary and meaningful. And it has carried on for years because the school system in most countries tend to see something written 50 years ago and name it a classic simply because it's old (not necessarily because it has literary merit).
Anyhow clearly there is a target audience for this, which clearly I am not.
I am still undecided should I just update this to like 1.5 stars?
I decided to check out this from the library, I wasn't sure if I wanted this book on my shelves, oh boy was that a good idea. I will not be getting myself a copy, I will probably not reread this anytime soon and I should really work a bit more on making sure the books on my shelf reflect my tastes.
This was used for the following challenges:
Classics
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