Will work when coffee has been ingested. And what better way to ingest caffeine than while thinking about J.D. Salinger.
His death didn't really hit me very hard because I didn't know the man and I have trouble performing the postmodern dance of grief for someone I neither knew nor whose work I enjoyed--possibly this is one effect of, you know, being a hermit. I literally know nothing about the man.
But I know about the book, mainly because almost everyone I know hated it in school. And with his passing I find myself wondering why. It seems like a good fit--make a bunch of disaffected, angry teenagers read a book about a disaffected angry teenager. They'll relate! They'll feel like the school understands them, for assigning such a book. This was the novel we were supposed to identify with, as opposed to Hamlet and Macbeth. And yet most of us recoiled from the book entirely. (I do love the passage the title comes from, though.) It's not that I thought Holden was a loser--I was a loser in high school, I had no room to judge. It wasn't the privilege. I had no money but lots of my friends did. I didn't hold it against them.
I think it's (yet another) instance of making teenagers in the 90s and 2000s read about the problems of teenagers in the 50s as though life stopped evolving and changing in 1969. We get that generation crammed down our mouths every time we turn around--we acted out their narratives in school plays like Butterflies Are Free and watched it in practically every movie--and when I was in school, the other side of the hand doing the cramming was making damn sure we knew what a bunch of lazy, spoiled brats we were and how we needed a war to toughen us up. Holden's story had literally nothing to do with us. It was the opposite of relatable. And yeah, everyone's a phony. But in 1951 that was a fairly bold thing to say. In 1995, when I read it, it was baby talk, and the cognitive dissonance of having a clearly bored and resentful teacher phoning it in to say it was still edgy to call someone a phony was way too much. The violence with which I hated that book is directly related to the system that insisted it was my story, when it was literally my grandfather's story. (Being a teenager in 1951 means being quite a bit older than either of my parents.)
So they're all fucking phonies, Holden. Yes, they are. And they used you to belittle us, and they used you to dismiss us, and they used you to avoid having to think for even a minute about us as anything but a disappointing reflection of their own generation. And we hated you for it, because we didn't know how to hate them. But in that sense, Salinger and his creation did a lot for us. He gave us a book we could bond over disliking without ever quite getting why, and gave school boards everywhere a chance to alienate teenagers and piss them off for a good long while yet.
And that's an investment in the future.
- Coming Through the Rye
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catvalente- January 29th, 2010
2010-01-29 06:12 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 10:18 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:17 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:18 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:18 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:22 pm (UTC)
Maybe I should just give up now.
2010-01-29 06:31 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:24 pm (UTC)
On the other hand, when reading Heinlein's juveniles in the same era, I knew I was reading them out of the decade they were written and made allowances for it because I wanted to read Starman Jones's story.
Perhaps today's teens need novels about disaffected teens and sparkly vampires...
Dr. Phil
2010-01-29 06:30 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:30 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:40 pm (UTC)
I did like the voice in general, and I did like the passages when Holden talked about something more interesting than his direct anger--like the passage you mentioned in regards to the title. There were several others like that one in there for me. In essence I liked him better in the moments when he was desperate and sad, but I didn't care for him as much when he was angry and fraught.
But no matter what, I'm glad my old high school was behind the times and still banning books back when I was there, so that I didn't have this kind of hateful relationship forged with the book like so many others did. In this case, I think they did me a favor. :)
2010-01-31 05:29 am (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:47 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:51 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:47 pm (UTC)
Interestingly enough Catcher in the Rye is notable as being amongst the books that was "banned" from numerous schools at different points. And has a long history on the censorship list.
Never quite understood why. I guess "language"?? (shrugs)
I read everything I could get my hands on in school and had to write book reports or talk about half of them. The novels I hated and worked hard to avoid were published in the 19th century.
So for me, a book, was a way to escape into another's head, often foreign territory. I, of course, preferred the less foreign that I could identify with..but that was merely because it is easier to read that which resonates or you agree with, than that which doesn't.
Have a close friend, african-american, relatives from the South, who won't venture below the Mason-Dixon line to live - she told me that she reads Flannery O'Connor to figure out how racists think. Always found that fascinating.
I don't like Catcher in the Rye, found it dreadfully dull and a tad dated, although the surrealistic writing style and the movie which was even more so...were ground-breaking for the time (it was the 1950s after all) - but it is not Salinger's only book, not by a large margin. I think he did another Frankie and Zoe or something like that, which is equally famous and I've heard better.
2010-01-29 07:55 pm (UTC)
I had a hard time getting through it, but I did like Holden, once I got past the layers of "woe is me, the world sucks." But I rather liked Franny and Zooey better.
2010-01-29 06:49 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 06:59 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 07:16 pm (UTC)
I had to read it 3 times(!) in the mid-80s for Jr. High and High-school teachers. I hated it all 3 times, but most of my classmates dug it. It still had the whiff of illicit at that point - the kind of thing our slightly-nutty not-so-ex-hippie AP English teacher liked to assign. Not out of cynicism, but out of a genuine belief that it was subversive and edgy, since that's probably still how he viewed it.
Interesting that 10-ish years later I would have been in the majority... though I suppose geography could have something to do with it as well.
I actually wrote a college entrance essay (on 'a book that influenced me') about how much I disliked that book and Holden's constant whining. I didn't get in...
2010-01-29 07:16 pm (UTC)
But there was precisely one likeable character in that book, and that character was definitely not the one with the most screen time.
Now, for the good and sightly more relevant, though it's also getting a bit dated, disaffected teenager book, try Rats Saw God by Rob Thomas.
2010-01-29 07:20 pm (UTC)
DEATH OF A GODDAMNED SALESMAN.
Ahem. Still bitter about that one. And in that case, you don't even have the tenuous justification of "he's a disaffected teenager; you're all disaffected teenagers; you should get along great!" He's a middle-aged guy in a job so outdated we have to explain to you what it entails, having a giant midlife crisis, and we're going to pretend you have some reason to care about him.
Hated that play, with the burning heat of a thousand suns. And I think the mentality you describe, that the world stopped somewhere around the childhoods or early adulthood of the teachers, contributed a lot to that.
2010-01-29 07:26 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 07:34 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 07:40 pm (UTC)
I suggest it because it took my brain far too long to keep those titles separate (I've never read either one).
2010-01-29 07:43 pm (UTC)
I've read it maybe 3 times since and definitely look at it differently than I did when I was 17. Caulfield's angst gets rather whiny, and he clearly suffers the same flaws he criticizes in others. It's hard to put aside the white male uppder-middle-class privilege. But I still enjoy reading the story from a more nuanced adult perspective. I often point out that it's a book written by a 30-year-old guy, not a teenager.
Of course, mileage varies and everyone is entitled to their own taste/opinion.
That said, I do think it's an over-valued book that over-shadows the rest of Salinger's published output. Even my boyfriend, a big Salinger fan, prefers the Glass family stories.
2010-01-29 07:57 pm (UTC)
Which is a big part of the point of the novel, isn't it? At least it seemed so to me.
2010-01-29 07:47 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 07:50 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 07:54 pm (UTC)
I guess I can see your point, I mean sure, it's not about kids of the '90s, but it seems weird to me to get so mad at a book because it's a few decades old and someone made you read it in school. If the book is bad that's one thing; if your mad at your teachers that's another.
I assume you like Shakespeare? Or Milton? Or Austen or Ellison or Dickens or something from previous eras that often gets assigned in school? If not, then you're admirably consistent. But if you do, what's the difference? Just the expectation you felt the adults had that you would relate to this one? Or is there really something between the covers that bugs you too?
Personally, the book I hated the most was the Scarlet Letter. I think because the type of Christians it was about pissed me off so much. Now, being more mature and accepting that disliking what they do in the story is a lot of the point, I feel I'd probably like it more. But I think I'd still be so annoyed at them that I wouldn't like it that much.
2010-01-29 08:16 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 07:54 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 07:58 pm (UTC)
I got my only English class D ever on my assignment for that book. The assignment was to answer a list of imagination-free questions about Catcher. The question handout was probably older than me, and invited me to talk about the Themes of the Book, the Symbolism of the Baseball Mitt, and the definition of the word "phony." My English teacher was known for his obsession with frog jokes and his reliance on ancient handouts; I don't ever remember him actually teaching anything. I filled out the answers with loathing, and I may actually have written something like, "I hate this book and I really don't care."
I think it must have been in February, or sometime in the winter, and I think I was in the middle of something I recognized eventually as my annual Seasonal Affective Disorder depressive kick. I know that I bounced hard off of Catcher, and that my hatred for it was something that I could hold on to in an awful month.
(It wasn't awful for any reason. I know now how incredibly privileged I was and am. But I was fourteen years old, and everything was just awful.)
2010-01-29 07:59 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 08:04 pm (UTC)
But this makes total sense. The Deep Message isn't deep for us. It was obvious. Everyone wears masks. EveryTHING is phony and manufactured. We grew up on cartoons made to sell toys, as elaborate marketing machines. My parents grew up on Roy Rogers teaching them what it meant to Be a Hero. Grandparents grew up in the Depression. No wonder we know different things by the time we're teens.
Thank you for thinking about this and writing it down.
2010-01-29 09:25 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 10:32 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 09:33 pm (UTC)
Loathesome, self-absorbed, whiny little snot.
And it wasn't MY story. It might, in 1951, have been my brother's story. Maybe. If my parents had been able to send him to a fancy school. But me? If my story even made it into the book, it would have been as a footnote. One of those gals his loser roommate tried to "give the time of day" to. :-P
2010-01-29 09:44 pm (UTC)
2010-01-29 10:31 pm (UTC)
So that keeps irritating me, especially since I'm a cusper, 1979. I am NOT Gen X. Someone born in 1960? Not my peer.