***Holden Caulfield Is Me And You- J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The
Rye

 

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Catcher In The Rye, J. D. Salinger, Little Brown and Company, New York, 1945, 1991   

Yeah, I know, you and I were the only ones who ever suffered the horrors of growing up absurd in America-name your generation. The only ones who suffered the pangs of teen angst and alienation like it didn’t come with the territory of being a teenager ever since they invented the category back a hundred plus years ago. Like every kid didn’t balk at the prospects in front of him or her in facing a society that they did not create, and had no say in creating. Personally for a long time I believed that my generation, the generation of ’68, the ones who made a lot of noise for a time about turning the world upside down and who today they make nostalgia films about, was the only generation that faced the grinding. And then we in our turn read the book under review, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye and knew we were not alone, that yes, this angst and alienation thing had been around for a while.       

Some of us from my time for a time made Holden Caulfield our literary hero, the kid who “spoke” to us in our coming of age time (until we, having come of age in the early 1960s, “discovered” Sal and Dean in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road). While there were many elements of Holden’s personality that might not ring true for any individual collectively his plight resonated. Problems of sexual identity, of intellectual identity, of class, of falseness and perversity, of the clash of household generations, of fighting against a system stacked up against the young, of personal depression, they are all there. As well as some less savory traits, a certain elitism, a certain distain of the masses, and of women, well girls really, and lots of mannerisms like having a negative on almost everything that one would hope he will grow out of.             

The story line here is fairly simple- a couple of tough winter days in the life of a well-off New York teenager whose problem at the moment was to hide the fact, postpone really, that once again he had been kicked out of a school for, ah, “not applying himself (sound familiar). The momentary solution to that situation which sounded reasonable to anybody who actually had been a troubled teenager was to say the hell with it and do a junior version of wine, women and song. Except, at least on the surface our man Holden takes no pleasure in that-carping against everything not nailed down, fellow classmates, teachers, past and present, cab drivers, elevator operators, whores, dicey girlfriends. Everything. By the end it is an open book whether he will be a CEO of a major corporation or windup on skid row. While some of the stream-of-consciousness devise used by Salinger to make his point about the modern teen condition this is a great American literary work of art from one of the best of the “non-beat” New York writers hanging around in the post- World War II period. Read the book, read the book more than once like I did.