Tenth Story

J. D. Salinger is dead.

He’s most famous – at least among the non-English-Department crowd – for Catcher in the Rye:

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.

With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.

Musta been a baby-boomer thing; I hated Catcher

No, that’s not true; I hated Holden Caulfield.  Viscerally.  Down in the pit of my stomach, I wanted to strangle that moopy little fop.  I don’t even know why.  I last read the book when I was 18; Caulfield filled me with revulsion so intense I could taste it.  Maybe that’s the mark of a good book – or maybe someone who probably wasn’t an especially sophisticated reader.  Not sure yet.

I probably should give Catcher another try, to see if the lack of post-adolescent emotion or hormones opens something up to me that I missed before.

Until then?  Sorry.

41 thoughts on “Tenth Story

  1. You were a soulless husk of a boy as a teenager.

    Try reading the book again making a special note of another famous line early in the book:

    “I am a terrific liar” (or something like that). Read the book keeping that in mind, while trying to figure out what *really* happened as opposed to what Holden *tells* you happened.

    “Scarlet Letter” deserves this kind of abuse. Not “Catcher”.

  2. No, that’s not true; I hated Holden Caulfield. Viscerally. Down in the pit of my stomach, I wanted to strangle that moopy little fop. I don’t even know why.

    Because whiners are tiresome?

    Catcher is a very overrated book. I did like Franny and Zooey better.

  3. Mitch, your time is valuable, don’t waste it on re-reading that. Watch TV if you can’t think of something better to do.

  4. Mel Gibson’s character in Conspiracy Theory is deranged. Although he’s never actually read the book, he is compelled, he must own a copy. If he loses his, he must get another at once. The government knows this and uses it to track him down via book store sales.

    Sounds about right – a book relished by crazies and no-one else.

  5. My POSSLQ was thrown out of an English class, after the teacher asked for honest opinions, when she opined that Caulfield was a self-centered brat, who deserved everything that happened to him.

  6. “Scarlet Letter” deserves this kind of abuse. Not “Catcher”.

    While I think Catcher in the Rye is overrated, it’s not terrible and I respectfully beg to differ with you, counselor — The Scarlet Letter is okay. Now, Silas Marner definitely deserves abuse.

  7. D,

    you are objectively wrong and that statement is filled with fail. As a teenage boy filled with hormones who longed to break away to freedom from the oppressions of school and parents and become an adult before my time Caulfield resonated. I say this with near certainty: if you didn’t identify with Holden you were not a normal teenage boy.

  8. Are you kidding, Mr. D? Silas Marner and Ebenezer Scrooge are two of the best miser characters in all of English Literature.

    Miser Lit; it’s a natural for fiscal conservatives!

    .

  9. Sorry Mitch, I’m with Learned Foot here. One of the very few counter-culture classics I find to be up to the hype is Catcher in the Rye.

    And I will add, Holden Caulfield was never supposed to be entirely likable as a character. He’s a moody little adolescent who sometimes thinks he knows everything, and then kicks himself because he realizes that makes him “typical” and he hates that most of all. That’s not very likable. What it is it understandable and an accurate depiction of a certain kind of person hitting that stage of life. It still held true as a study of a lot of people I knew growing up hitting the same stage of life in the 80’s. That kind of truth-telling characterization is rare now. It was rarer still – by a lot – when that book was published.

  10. Wow, a Silas Marner fan! I’d always heard it was theoretically possible.

    Maybe I’ll have to pick it up again on your recommendation, Nate. Somehow reading it in Sister Kenneth’s 10th grade English class didn’t make it exactly come alive.

  11. Read it in either jr high or high school. Never got it. Didnt speak to me. I got nothing out of it. I understand if you read it as an adult, you have to shot someone famous. Just saying.

  12. Pen,

    We’ve been through this on this blog at least twice. The Baby Boom is a social thing more than a chronological one. Baby Boomers are the children of people who came home from WWII and had kids (and people roughly their age).

    My parents were 9 and 5 on VJ day.

    I share no cultural references with the baby boomers; JFK was shot when I was 11 months old; I don’t remember the Beatles except as an “oldie”; I do remember the moon landing and the RFK and ML King assassinations, but only because I have a lot of early detailed memories; theyre novelties, not parts of “my” culture.

    I know, it makes a few commenters happy to hop up and down like poo-flinging monkeys ahd say “no, no no, anyone born before 1964 is a baby boomer”, but that’s the mark of the hopeless idiot.

  13. Foot and Doug,

    No, I get it. It’s a great book. It’s not like it didn’t make an impression.

    I may have to read it again and write about it.

  14. As a teenage boy filled with hormones who longed to break away to freedom from the oppressions of school and parents and become an adult before my time Caulfield resonated. I say this with near certainty: if you didn’t identify with Holden you were not a normal teenage boy.

    Well yeah, Foot. That was the idea. I didn’t want to be a normal teenage boy. Of course I understood the repression of school, parents, etc. I went to Catholic schools and can tell nasty nun stories for hours. But that’s the point — I heard variations on the same theme from nearly all my friends growing up so reading Catcher didn’t resonate as much for me, precisely because it didn’t take me anyplace that I hadn’t already been. And after I’d gone off to college and met some real-life prep school boys (my school was crawling with them), it only hardened my view of the matter.

    Having said that, I fully understand why Catcher resonates with so many people. And I do think that young people ought to read it; it’s one of many books a literate American ought to read. My son is 14 now and he’ll probably read Catcher in a year or two. But it’s still overrated.

  15. Mr. D said: “Sister Kenneth’s 10th grade English”

    And then: “I went to Catholic schools and can tell nasty nun stories for hours.”

    Clearly.

  16. Mr. D revealed some disturbing fantasies:

    “I didn’t want to be a normal teenage boy…. I…tell nasty nun stories for hours. And after I’d gone off to college and met some real-life prep school boys … it only hardened….

    [M]y…[c]atcher…is 14 now…. He’ll probably read…in a year or two.

  17. “I didn’t want to be a normal teenage boy…. I…tell nasty nun stories for hours. And after I’d gone off to college and met some real-life prep school boys … it only hardened….

    [M]y…[c]atcher…is 14 now…. He’ll probably read…in a year or two.

    ROFLMAO. It’s all clear now — Clown is Maureen Dowd!

  18. I read the book for the hot parts. There weren’t any. So I figured, what’s the point?

  19. My Dad was pretty excited for me to read the book when I was 14 or 15. Since the kid was masturbating by page 5, I was slightly taken aback that my dad wanted me to read it.

    Give me “A Separate Piece” or “Stand By Me” – a real coming of age story anytime over a moody moping through puberty “Catcher in the Rye”.

  20. It’s a sorry imitation of “Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers,” which also has a sorry imitation in “Die Neuen Leiden des Jungen W.” Sorry, I read it, wasn’t that impressed.

  21. Mitch, you are not a baby boomer, you are part of the beginning (ie older) of Gen X, roughly 1961 to 1981. (30 year old to 50 year old)

  22. I’m with gill0137 and Mitch about “Catcher in the Rye”; although perhaps it was because I was a teenage girl when I read it, not a teanage boy. I much preferred A Separate Peace.

    If you don’t want to be like everyone else at any age – don’t be; no one is stopping you —- but stop whining about it, and just DO it already.

  23. That the authors of SitD and all the Mitchketeers are closet Nazis.

    Parlor Bolsheviks tend to discern these things, doncha know.

  24. That the authors of SitD and all the Mitchketeers are closet Nazis.

    At least we keep it in hung safely in the closet versus out in the middle of the street like a certain New Yorker I know my clownish friend.

  25. closet Nazis.

    Nah. Being a Reagan Republican, I am a greater proponent of liberty and equality than the average bear.

    But I did at one point have a “Know Your Enemies” shelf (and I need to rebuild it one of these days) with Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, The Turner Diaries (That’s a tricky one to buy in polite company, lemme tell you), It Takes A Village, Future Of An Illusion, Moses and Monotheism and a bunch of the other key books calling for the downfall of Western Civilization.

    Because a key part of beating your enemy is knowing her side better than she does.

  26. AngryClown is confusing Goethe and Plenzdorf with Schicklgruber? Mmmmkay….guess that says all we need to know about liberal intellectualism, doesn’t it, Mitch?

  27. Don’t get riled. AC isn’t using Nazi in any intellectual sense – it’s doubtful he even knows that it means National Socialist.

    Confusing a bunch of Reagan Republicans with socialists would mean he has no idea what either of them stand for.

    Naw, AC is using standard lib-speak in which “Nazi” means “won’t let me do what I want.” Come to think of it, my 3-year-old granddaughter said she hates me too, for exactly the same reason.

  28. Nate, you silly douchebag. The Nazis weren’t any more socialist than the leaders of the People’s Republic of China are Republicans.

    Hitler liquidated socialists. And the mentally defective, don’t forget. That’s your real worry right there, nate.

  29. (Mitch sits back and wonders: Should I go into a history of the Nazi Party, complete with all the elements of Leninism Hitler both imported and/or co-opted? The Leninist mistakes that the Nazis learned from and improved on? Like creating an economy that was as comprehensively command-run as any socialist one, but which kept a tightly-controlled capitalist class? To co-opt the Church to his purposes rather than exterminating it? Exploiting German volk traditions rather than eradicating them?)

    (Should Mitch, indeed, launch into a complete dissertations on the ways in which straight-up “left/right” comparisons in the American sense, or even sprung from semi-rational perversions of the American senses of those terms, are meaningless)

    (Or should Mitch just let rip with a juicy rhetorical fart and go home for the weekend?)

    So’s your momma.

    (Waves foetid miasma from rhetorical nether regions, gets jacket and mitts for trip home).

  30. Here’s a good overview of the arguments against and fr Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: http://www.hnn.us/articles/122469.html.
    Griffin and Paxton’s criticisms of the book are the only one’s worth reading. Golberg’s response to his critics is there as well.
    The gist of the criticism relies on definitions rather than factual disputes. Goldberg’s critics’ problem is that the more precisely you define fascism to differentiate it from socialism, the more innocuous it becomes. “building a strong sense of national community on the basis of a shared mythical past” doesn’t sound dangerous. Unfortunately the other, less pleasant things we associate with fascism are just as easily associated with progressive movements. Eugenics? Yep. War? Yep. Prison camps? Yep. Destruction of free trade unions? Yep. The end of free elections? Yep.

    Here’s Paxton:

    Fascism is given an equally broad definition [in Goldberg’s book]: it is any use of state power to make the world better and to create a community. This is not only too vague to mean much, it is simply wrong. Authentic fascists have never wanted to make the whole world better. As uncompromising nationalists, they want to make their own group stronger, purer, and more unified, and establish its domination over inferior groups, by force if necessary. Goldberg’s real target is state activism, and matters would be much clearer if he had just left it at that.

    There are two problems with this paragraph. The first is that Paxton is changing Goldberg’s definition of “the world” to mean something like “everyone in the world” or “all communities in the world”. I’ve read Goldberg’s book, what he meant by the world was “to make the world better as they saw it. This is clear in the text.
    The second problem with Paxton’s definition of fascism is that it describes Nazism very well, but doesn’t really describe Italian or Spanish fascism. Tito’s Yugoslavia? maybe, but then we know that Tito was a communist and so he couldn’t have been a fascist. They are opposites, after all.

  31. “Mitch, you are not a baby boomer, you are part of the beginning (ie older) of Gen X, roughly 1961 to 1981. (30 year old to 50 year old)”

    I doubt Mitch and I share a cultural past, despite being in the same “generation.” Twenty years is a long time. I had (barely) internet in high school, which I think had a huge effect on my generation. The point being these whole “generation” labels are pretty poor.

    On the other hand, I also consider Holden to be a whiny brat and couldn’t stand “Catcher.” If I wanted that, I could talk to my classmates.

  32. Guys, before we try and reason with AngryClown, do keep in mind that the nincompoop confuses Goethe with Schicklgruber, and the Mets with a baseball team. There are some things that are just beyond help.

  33. The point being these whole “generation” labels are pretty poor.

    Indeed they are. I was born late ’63, my youngest sibling was born in 1976. His cultural references are very different than mine.

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