Sixty-five years later, we still don’t get ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and Holden Caulfield

In the summer of 2000, as most kids begged their parents for the newly-released PlayStation 2, I was in the library of my local church in Calcutta. Amid dusty shelves of Westerns and Enid Blyton novels, I found an old copy of The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.

The plain-looking cover didn’t interest me, but the first sentence was unlike any introduction I’d read before. “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 all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it...”

The Catcher in the Rye, a book everyone loves to love, celebrates its 65th anniversary this month, and I settled down once again for a couple of hours in the familiar company of Holden Caulfield. The central character, whom one Goodreads reviewer describes as “whiny, disturbed, insane”, was labelled “preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief” by The Christian Science Monitor on the book’s publication in 1951. The irony of finding this particular book in my church library wasn’t lost on me.

Book-banning campaigns, commie plots, parental outrage at awkward sexual situations, and profane language have all been heaped on to this novel. To make matters worse, Mark Chapman, who murdered John Lennon in 1980, was carrying a copy of the book and later told the police, “I’m sure the big part of me was Holden Caulfield...” But through it all, The Catcher in the Rye has remained one of the most influential literary works of modern times.

That phony feeling

The book is synonymous with teenage rebellion, the gracelessness of puberty and how the world is being run by a bunch of phonies. Or as Holden puts it, “Everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddamn cliques.” But that’s just one reading. Could there be, through all of Holden’s rants and experiences, a bigger message of finding your own place? One way or another, whether you’re 13 or 30, love or loathe Holden, you cannot ignore The Catcher in the Rye.

Geographically and culturally, Holden and I had nothing in common and still don’t. New York in the 1950s was an alien world, and I certainly wouldn’t be found smoking a cigarette over breakfast in the company of two nuns. Yet there is a strong sense of familiarity that runs throughout the novel.

In one scene, Holden recounts how his boarding school Headmaster spent hours chatting up parents who were well-dressed, while a fake smile and quick hello would have to do for those who were shabby to look at. We’ve all witnessed, or been part of, this kind of two-facedness in various situations. In another scene, Holden highlights the narcissism of a classmate, bringing up a point that is even more relevant today. “You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he’s a real hot-shot, and they’re always asking you to do them a big favour. Just because they’re crazy about themselves, they think you’re crazy about them, too, and that you’re just dying to them a favour. It’s sort of funny, in a way.”

That sums up the kind of social media haze we’re living in, currently. The constant need to portray a perfect side of us online, completely forgetting these virtual characters are not who we really are. Haters of the novel consider Holden levels of idealism too much, and frankly, just stupid. They’re not completely wrong, as Phoebe, Holden’s ten-year-old sister, tells him:

“You don’t like anything that’s happening.

“Yes I do. Sure I do. Why the hell do you say that?”

“Because you don’t. You don’t like any schools. You don’t like a million things. You don’t.”

And that’s true. Holden is a pain in the ass.

How to get real

Here’s a teenager exhausting himself and wasting time worrying about every little thing in the world. From the personal hygiene of his classmates to the fate of the ducks on a frozen pond, the boy’s got a lot on his plate. You feel kind of sorry for him. He judges everything about everyone, but that’s not all that makes The Catcher in the Rye a special work of fiction.

What propels the novel is Holden’s struggling yet forward movement towards self-realisation and acceptance of others. We see it happen in the conversation with his former English teacher who tells him that all this hating will result in a disastrous fall. To which Holden replies that he doesn’t hate people for too long. And if he doesn’t see them around, he kind of misses them.

Another instance of self-acceptance comes towards the end of the novel when Phoebe asks him what he’d like to be. “...I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye...and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff...That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

Not a single character in the entire novel empathises with Holden, or even listens to what he has to say. His English teacher seems to get him, but he turns out to be a creep. It’s both heartening and depressing to witness his ten-year-old sister listening to him, while she’s the person he would like to protect from the phoniness outside.

There’s no denying the fact the novel drips melancholy. “People never notice anything”; “Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody”; “Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them – especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.” But Salinger manages to get inside the head of a 16-year-old on the brink of growing up, even though time isn’t on his side, and show the reader how everything hasn’t gone south.

Obsessing over anything is bad, especially this novel. Here’s what Salinger had to say to a man who left his job and family and drove over four hundred miles to meet the reclusive writer. “I may present questions in my writing in a certain way, but I don’t pretend to know the answers...I’m not a counsellor. I’m a fiction writer.”

Revisiting Holden

The Catcher in the Rye might be one of the most loved/hated/misunderstood books of all time, mainly because it brings up more questions than answers and is driven more by the peculiar language of its narrator than plot. The intimate tone of these questions leads readers to extreme conclusions.

While that is dangerous, it is also where the power of a good story lies. You’re not only with Holden as he solicits a prostitute or considers working on a ranch, you’re also wondering why he’s doing it or what you would have done in a similar situation.

Way leads on to way, said Robert Frost. And reading leads on to more reading. Good novels are like relatives. And, unlike the flesh and blood variety, they never disappoint.

The Catcher in the Rye isn’t a guidebook for rebels aged 13 or 30. It is the story of a boy coming to terms with himself and the world, bumming around New York City. The jump from the innocence of childhood to the adult world is something we all struggle with.

Sixteen-year-old Holden has already grown six inches in a year and one side of his head is packed with grey hair. This has got to be tough for a teenager who loves The Museum of Natural History because “they stick things in big glass cases and just leave them alone.”

The beauty of a great book lies in its power to transport us to a spacetime we may not not have been in. It draws you in with its own story while allowing you to find your own between the lines. That is one of the main reasons why we keep coming back to a particular novel (thirteen times in this case).

If you’re a first-time reader of this book, my wish for you is an open mind and a good time. For those who decide to re-read it as it celebrates 65 years in publication, go easy since you don’t need to be like the teenaged Holden anymore, judging everything exhaustively. The Catcher in the Rye will call you out on your phoniness, and that’s exactly what we need in our media-saturated world of today.

PS: Sadly, my church library closed down sometime in the mid-2000s and all the books were shipped off to an unknown location.

People are always ruining things for you.