Four Reasons I Reconsidered Catcher In The Rye

I expected to hate Catcher in the Rye. Except for a brief but tumultuous affair with Kerouac during my junior year of college, I’ve always been suspicious of educated, angst-ridden youths. Holden Caulfield’s legacy of torn leather jackets and frayed sweater vests—from Burroughs to Cuomo to Cera—is often written off in my mind as wholly foreign, worlds away from my rural upbringing and church-inspired need for small talk and donuts on Sunday.

And then I read it this week. Ok, to be perfectly honest, right now, between bouts of writing. After being given this assignment, I first reasoned: “Do a List of the Day incorporating some kind of eulogy to J.D. Salinger? I can do that. Even if I’ve never read anything he wrote.” Caulfieldesque, no? As Paste‘s other new Assistant Editor, I realize I probably shouldn’t admit this. But, though I paid due diligence to Lord of the Flies and The Metamorphosis in 9th grade, I was never assigned Salinger’s novel, and in college I was too busy wondering what in God’s name J.M. Coetzee meant to go back and read the classic. Or so I said to myself. Truth be absolutely, one hundred percent told, I didn’t want to.

Which brings me to now. After searching frantically around the Web-wasteland for anything in Salinger’s life that resonated with me, I failed miserably and something, we’ll call it Journalistic Integrity, started to itch. Plus there’s little information in his online biographies; the man put Thomas Pynchon and the Athonite hermits to shame in his reclusive ways. The one main thing he left, the creature born slowly and painfully of keys plinking through endless nights and an almost Gnostic disregard for his own flesh, is Holden. So I found an old copy of the book and here I am at 4 a.m., thrilling to the 17-year-old I thought I’d detest. This computer screen, glowing in the early-morning dark, is my candlelit vigil for the grouchy genius who passed on yesterday. Here are four reasons I’ve fallen for the angry teenage boy I thought I would loathe.

1. His Language
“‘Boy,’ I said. I also say boy quite a lot, partly because I have a lousy vocabulary, and partly because I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was 16 then and I’m 17 now and sometimes I act like I’m about 13. It’s really ironical because I’m 6’2” and I have gray hair."

2. Stradlater
Stradlater, Holden’s attractive roommate, establishes the latter’s interactions with his peers. In Sherman Alexei’s “Every Little Hurricane” the protagonist watches his uncles “slugging with such force they had to be in love. Strangers would never want to hurt each other that badly.” Though their bloody, jealous encounters don’t reach the same level of companionship, the boys’ relationship is a perfect picture of two teens, drawn together like magnets one minute, reversing poles and repulsing each other the next.

3. Holden’s departure from Pencey Prep
“I stood for a while next to the stairs and took a last look down the goddamn corridor. I was sort of crying, I don’t know why. I put my red hunting hat on and turned the peak around to the back the way I liked it and then I yelled at the top of my goddamn voice: ‘Sleep tight, ya morons!’ Then I got the hell out.”

4. Holden’s Impossible Standards
The severe self-righteousness of the skinny-jean, lo-fi, anti-fakery police is nowhere to be found in Catcher in the Rye, even with an anachronistic read of the text. True, at the beginning of the story, Holden declares “Grand…there’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.” “Phony” then becomes his word of choice to describe any negative attribute throughout the rest of the book. But, of course, this was one of the first books to establish the paradigm that’s become constrictive and here the protagonist’s wide-eyed, profanity laced narration on the topic is art, not artifice.