THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

J.D. Salinger’s death inspired us to pick this for our YA book club. I’d read it once before, but in college (just on my own, not for a class), too late, I felt at the time, for it to have a genuine impact on me. Knowing the book had such an iconic status made it hard for it to live up to its reputation. I remember thinking it was well-written, but I just didn’t see how so many people could love it so much—and especially, how it could inspire someone to assassinate Lennon or Reagan. I was too caught up in the idea that I was supposed to identify with Holden Caulfield, and I didn’t. How could I, really? I was a 1990s suburban Midwestern girl with no real experience of getting expelled from boarding school, drinking, smoking, sex, true alienation, or wandering New York City alone. I had a hard time even sympathizing with Holden’s refusal to get good grades.

Rereading the book in my thirties, however, I was freed from a lot of the assumptions about how it was supposed to make me feel, and I really liked it. Two decades removed from Holden, I saw him as a typical smart, sensitive, posturing teenage boy, sometimes endearing, sometimes annoying as hell, trying to come to terms with one of the central revelations of growing up: that a lot of the adult world is bullshit. A lot of people just buy into the bullshit, and others (like me) recognize it and try to live with it as best they can without letting it touch them, but some people just can’t handle it, and it hurts them. Realizing that I could understand Holden without having to always like him was the key to the book for me. Even though I don’t really like picaresque plot structures like this one, I enjoyed it as a masterful character study (and not just of Holden—Phoebe is one of the most awesome little girls in classic literature). I’ll still roll my eyes at anyone who calls Holden their hero (a la Jake Gyllenhaal in The Good Girl), but I definitely won’t be all “Ho hum, The Catcher in the Rye, so cliché” anymore, which I’d fallen into the habit of before. I might not adore it or want to carry a copy around in my back pocket, but it’s a genuinely good book.