Catcher in the Rye

I tried to read The Catcher in the Rye (can't get the touchstone to work), but gave up about halfway through. I had high hopes for this book; I'd seen it touted as one that people who feel like outsiders could easily relate to. I have a lot of experience being an outsider, so I figured I was one of the people who would love this book. But I couldn't relate to it at all; I couldn't find anything appealing about the main character. And nothing happening in the book was interesting enough to compel me to keep reading.

So, what is it about this book? What makes people relate to Holden Caulfield? And is there any reason I should try it again?

I've read it cover to cover, and I don't get it either. So I'd like to hear these reasons...

Well, I first read the book when I was a teenager and Holden perfectly mirrored my emotions. He's confused about the world, he's frustrated by people and alternatively still trusts them more than an adult would, he's honest while he wants to be dishonest, he loves his siblings, but he just doesn't know where he's going. People complain that he's too whiny but his whining spoke to me in a way that I don't think it speaks to people above the age of 16 or 17. He has a lot of angst, but so did I. I actually read it again at 20 and connected with Holden even more because my brother had passed away less than a year ago and suddenly I could understand why Holden struggled so much and why he felt that the world was so unfair to him and that people didn't understand. I suspect without my life experiences and without reading it at the right age, I wouldn't have understood, but perhaps if you try to look at it from the perspective of a very damaged boy, instead of a whiny one.

I haven't read it in years, but as a teenager I read it more than once. I think I would enjoy it if I did reread it now.

From the many comments about this book in LT threads I wonder if it's a book that's best read for the first time as a kid.

Also, I really enjoyed the descriptions of NYC in that time period. It takes you to a different place and time. And don't forget that it was kind of groundbreaking when it was published. After years of reading books derived from Catcher, it won't seem original.

I hated this book. I couldn't identify with Holden in the least, and I *did* read it as a teenager. My strongest memory is the hopelessness of trying to get through to someone so scattery. I'd probably kill him if I knew him in real life. Ack.

I adored Holden when I first read Catcher in the Rye. (I was fifteen.) When I re-read it ten years later it had lost of a lot of its luster. It is the perfect "teenage angst" book, in that respect.

I felt the same way about the Bell Jar, too.

I think I said this once before on another thread, but I also read it recently as a teen and didn't get it either. It just seemed... pointless. I do like a well-written book, but I think it needed something more in the way of a plot to make it enjoyable.

I’m slightly surprised there haven’t been more people defending Catcher in the Rye.

Like all good books, Catcher engages with the society around it. This is a book that appeared in the 1951, in the aftermath of World War II, with the Cold War under way and, not unrelated to this, in a society in which conformity was highly valued. Most of white America enjoyed a standard of living unparalleled in human history and to work hard and consume was to perform a patriotic duty. Holden, in his own way, questions this.

In this sense, Holden is an outsider. But I think at the heart of the book is a sense of loss and a desire to belong. This is perhaps what has made the book so popular: Holden is ironic and funny but also very vulnerable. He is living in the world that is unfolding after the horrors of World War II and in the shadow of the bomb. If he has little faith in the world at large it is because the world is indifferent to him; the death of his talented, charismatic brother another example of how senseless and fragile life often is.

I'm sorry people here didn't enjoy it more because I still think it is a wonderful book. Maybe one more go...

I just remember thinking that Holden was really funny, in a dark kind of way. I am planning to re-read it this year, to see how my impressions of it have changed, because right now it is listed as one of my favorite books.

I tried and almost finished but he was getting on my nerves so bad I had to quit. I felt like he was just babbling and rambling all the time.

I think part of Holden's charm/pull on people is not just the angst and confusion, but he is a little unbalanced, isn't he? We can relate to his helplessness and anger, but he is one step beyond, and in viewing our circumstances or emotions reflected against his, we come out a little better, a little more able to cope...

but it has been a few years since I last read it, so I'm sure I could use a re-read...

I read it for the first time a few months ago, as I turned 30. While I can see why Catcher in the Rye finds its most receptive reading with adolescents, I think Holden's dissatisfactions with society are rooted in more than just teen angst; as adults we learn to live with everyday hypocrisy, transience, and banality, but that doesn't mean we lose our distate for them.

I found Holden a very likeable character. As someone else says, he wants to belong, and he wants (and tries) to engage with people honestly. Certainly I'd find anyone a little odd who didn't find him articulating to a greater or lesser extent their teenage self. And I don't think his voice is scattery, babbling or rambling; certainly not more so than the voices around the water cooler.

As for rereading it, it's a pretty short book which you could do in a few hours one Sunday afternoon / evening. I'd say it's worth that amount of time to at least get to the end and view it as a whole. We're not talking Middlemarch here. So, why not?

I have this book on my "to be read" list.

There was a great (I thought) analysis of Holden and The Catcher in the Rye by Will Smith's character in the movie Six Degrees of Separation... And I think the book played a role in Conspiracy Theory with Julia Roberts as well.

I believe there was also a Far Side cartoon with 2 guys pushing bodies through the rye...

I tried to get my husband, a smart, undereducated guy from a working-class background (at best), to read Catcher because I love it so much. He felt very unsympathetic toward Holden on the grounds that that kind of teenage angst is a luxury of the well-off. He has a point, but (like someone upthread said) one of the reasons I like the book so much is that it's a snapshot of a different time and place.

And, all plot/characterization issues aside, I think Salinger was just a damn good writer. I particularly enjoy how he writes about children.

I remember loving The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager. I'm almost afraid to re-read it. I have 3 copies on my shelves - mine, my husband's, and my MIL's first edition. Have to keep them all for sentimental value.

The best thing about Catcher is that it caused me to read all of J.D. Salinger's other works. I love pretty much everything else he wrote 'way more than Catcher. Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction, Franny and Zooey, plus all his (pirated) uncollected short stories and stuff you can still only find in old magazines. They are all re-readable.

The Glass family is wonderful - Seymour, Buddy, Boo-Boo, the twins, Franny, Zooey (is there another brother I missed?) - and I agree with #16 Scratch about how he writes about children. They are magical, and innocent, and can be brilliant.

#17: Yeah, he gets the magical-innocent-brilliant thing all right, yet without a trace of sentimentality or preciousness. That's what gets me.

"THIS guy doesn't even know what backgammon is. They don't even HAVE one." --from one of the Nine Stories whose name I can't recall.

Scratch - I'm tempted to go to Nine Stories and find that quote! I'm at work now, but perhaps this weekend.

Catcher in the Rye doesn't have much of a plot; it is less a story a more a character study of Holden. Whether you love or hate him, he is an interesting character and that's a big part of the appeal of the story. I didn't find him particularly likable either. He is a hypocrite and has a lot of conflicting goals running around in his head -- a strange mix of wisdom and ignorance. I always got the feel that he was a bright kid with potential, but very immature and socially inept. He is interesting from the standpoint that there are aspects of Holden in most of us and most of the people we know.

Also, the book does a good job of capturing the context of the times in which it was written, and the themes of mortality and impermanence, social hypocrisy, etc, are topics I find interesting.

Having said all of that...if you want to read a great Salinger book, read Franny and Zooey. Much better than Catcher in the Rye.

-- M1001

He is a hypocrite and has a lot of conflicting goals running around in his head -- a strange mix of wisdom and ignorance ... a bright kid with potential, but very immature and socially inept.

The very definition of a "troubled teen," no? And thus JDS made a particular character's situation "universally" relevant -- except that now, in the post-deconstructionist age of lit crit, we approach that concept with a grain of salt, as evidenced upthread several times.

And the context of its time--oh god yes. "Under the Biltmore clock"--so, so long ago. Or, as a friend of mine summarized it, "When even the bad kids wore ties to school."

James Dean, in Rebel Without a Cause, wore a sport jacket to high school.

Rebel!

I think if you want to understand Salinger, watch the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

Salinger participated in those landings. He was in the military before the war started, in part so he could afford night classes in creative writing. He met Hemingway during the war. He took a typewriter in foxholes. After the war, he was an intelligence officer in the de-Nazification of Germany. Then he checked himself into a mental hospital in Austria for shell shock (post-traumatic stress syndrome) and, as in Farewell to Arms, married his nurse.

Unlike Holden, Salinger enjoyed prep school, sent his kids to prep schools and the Ivy League, and wanted no part of the hippie movement which tried to claim him. On formal occasions he wore an ascot (!). He met with his war buddies the rest of his life. Still does, as far as I know.

I can't help seeing The Catcher in the Rye as a quest that almost mimics Salinger's. Odysseus went on a quest for home. Others have gone on quests, for gold, to test one's mettle, for meaning in life, or for permanent values in a world that wants to undermine them.

Holden Caulfield wound up in a mental hospital. So did Salinger. But Salinger made it out with most of his faculties intact.

Well, mental hospitals are hospitals, after all: the point is to emerge with faculties restored and intact if at all possible.

Anyway, I always suspected Bananafish was more autobiographical than Catcher. (But only up to the denouement, of course.)

Spoiled brat. Lack of compassion. Money for nothing.
I should explain that I am a big fan of Ham on rye, bukowski's anwser to this book. That might be why I found Catcher in the rye a painful and uninteresting load of steamy poo.

>25 jojodonkeyboy: At the risk of sounding terribly holier-than-thou...maybe those who cannot muster up much compassion are the ones that need compassion the most from the rest of us?

When I read Catcher (in high school), it was engrossing, terrifically funny and right on-point. Not sure what it would be like to read it again now, but the fact that I currently look for books whose protagonists have lots of empathy and maturity, rather than ennui and screwed-up inadequacy, means that I have changed as a reader and my readerly needs have changed, which is the natural way of things, right?

I don't really recall what my reaction was when i read it in high school other that I didn't understand why they wanted to put him away.

Then I reread it when i was in my 50s. And it made me feel unbalanced for a couple days.

A short book, around 200 pages, you can read it anyway. For teenagers, who want to lead the famous nightlife of urban teenagers. A book about learning to be an adult, to be independent, gaining some experience. Less Than Zero is similar, and Goodbye Columbus. Such a teenager can get into serious problems, like homelessness or being paid for sex. As in Midnight Cowboy. These are certain problems that you encounter at this age, and maybe later you avoid such situations, but in your youth you just go too far, which is later remembered with distaste. So these are bad roads not taken. These dangerous situations are like in the army, that's why it's good for young men to serve in the army even for several months, to get rid of these wild oats.