When I first endured this merciless literary thumbscrew, it was in the late 1970s, at the behest of a high school English teacher who wore clogs, wooden jewelry and ambulatory tents made of faded denim. She believed with almost anguished sincerity that her students would "connect" with Holden, or find something "relevant" in the book. I quickly came to a conclusion that a recent re-reading has done nothing to dispel: Holden is a jackass. He's a spoiled prep school jerk who's so sickeningly self-involved that he has no clue that the people around him exist as anything other than background figures in the melodrama going on entirely in his own skull. He constantly refers to anything that doesn't meet with his schoolboy approval as "corny" and labors under the delusion that he's the first person who ever noticed that the transition out of childhood is awkward and uncomfortable, or that it's just no picnic facing grief and loss. Listen, you pustular little spud, we all go through it, and it's about as cosmically significant as a crumpled wad of used Kleenex. Maybe half a century ago, this hog wallow of teen angst was something fresh. But if Salinger had some larger point to make about coming of age it has all but disappeared in the fetishization of adolescence that took off not too long afterward, and has clung to our culture ever since. And the excruciating way that Holden speaks-the kid sounds like his lines were written by some Monogram Pictures hack who specialized in gangster dialogue for Bowery Boys movies. All that's missing from Holden's self-consciously brittle patois is some edgy patter about the agony of acne or the distressing appearance of pubic hair. ("One crummy day these goddam phony red spots started sprouting all over my mug. Next day it was some corny cork-screwy hairs poppin' outta my BVDs. . . .") On the plus side, this book did make me feel embarrassed to admit that I was 16, but I was one of only two people in the class who felt that way. The other one is in prison today. He strangled an impossibly precocious brat named Allie.

The book does, however offer one appealing if thinly drawn character. This is Edgar Marsalla, the hero who blew an audible fart in the chapel. I can't help feeling that he was expressing his opinion of his grating classmate, and got along much better in life than Holden ever did.


A classic of notoriety instead of quality   December 8, 2005
 38 out of 62 found this review helpful

"Catcher in the Rye" is supremely overrated piece of garbage. It provided a few chuckles, and was of interest to me as to how privileged young people in New York spoke in that era, but it has only attained its status as "classic" because of the controversy it caused upon publication in Truman era America and also thanks to three generations of high-school English teachers desperate to be thought of as "cool" by their students by assigning a "dirty" book in class. It's really hilarious to me how the cover of my edition is printed in a very stark and naked style, with only the title and author laid out against a red background, as if front-cover art or back-cover blurbs would detract from the gravitas of this very serious "classic". What a joke. This book has no artistic or philosophical merit whatsoever and only warrants notice as a cultural icon of mid to late 20th century America, to our people's eternal embarrassment and shame. Holden Caulfield is a nauseating adolescent with a vocabulary limited to swear words and slang, who goes around getting drunk, thinking about sex and being depressed about the supposed phoniness of everyone but himself. The book appeals to the supercilious, self-centered, oh-so-sensitive, "I gaze upon the world and weep" type of teenager to whom the character of Holden gives reinforcement for their idiotic, anti-social behavior. Of all people, they should not be reading this book (not that anyone should), let alone having it assigned to them by adults who are supposed to be preparing them for maturity and responsibility. This book belongs on the ash-heap of literary history. Completely worthless.


A Classic Snooze-Fest   January 29, 2006
 38 out of 52 found this review helpful

Okay, unless you live in a cave you've heard of Catcher in the Rye. Most likely it was mentioned in hushed tones usually reserved for Events of Monumentous Occasion and Venerable Fixtures of American Popular Culture.

During my senior year in High School (1985) my English class was assigned to read this book (as every English class has been required to do since the Truman Administration). I "opted out" as it were. Years later I found a copy of this Hallowed Work for 25 in a thrift shop and thought I'd see what I'd missed waaaay back when. Turns out, I really was better off ditching school and going to Disneyland.

Sorry folks but this is a textbook example of Much Adoo About Nothing. The truly ironic part is that most folks who gush about Catcher in the Rye would be excatly the kind of people Holden refers to as "phonies".

There seems to be an obligation to love this book in order to consider yourself enlightened or progressive. I can see why this act plays big on both coasts.

This was the book that ushered in the angst-ridden teenager as anti-hero that survives to this day in the form of tone-deaf Emo and Nu-Metal bands.

How the reader is supposed to have any empathy for a trust fund baby with a chip on his should escapes me. Maybe it's becuase I was not rich and angst-ridden as a teen.

The book itself is a tedious, read. Dull, long-winded and repetitive Caufield rambles aimlessly through what is supposed to be a couple of days but reads like 10 years. All the characters are forgettable and by the end of the book you're rooting for Holden to get run over by a taxi.

This emperor, truly, wears no clothes.


A timeless, honest, controversial, superbly written tale   June 2, 2000
 29 out of 32 found this review helpful

Have you ever gotten fed up with the world? Have you ever just had enough of everybody's stupid, phony attitudes and this tainted game that we call life? You feel like you're all alone, there's no one that will listen to you, and the ones that do turn out to be perverts and phonies. Are they all crazy, or is it me?

This is the attitude that Holden Caulfield, a disgruntled 16 year-old, takes toward life. He's just flunked out of another school, his younger brother Allie is dead, he's a virgin, and to top it all off, everyone around him is a phony. Holden is alone in this superficial, corrupt world he lives in.

What amazes me most about A Catcher in the Rye is it's incredibly controversial beginnings when it was first published. The book took place and was published in the 1940's, and society was based on being right and proper. Things like hollow conversation just for the sake of conversing defined what Holden held as "phony". Holden hated phonies with a passion, and throughout the book made brutal, dead-on observations about the world which were stated in crude dialect. This caused much uprising in society, and was stereotyped as "evil" and "insignificant" by the common "phony" book reviewer of the time. Even serial killers were found with the book on them. Mark Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon, was found with the book in his pocket after the crime. As you can imagine this didn't help the situation at all.

In the real world, evil was personified as Holden Caulfield. People reacted to the book just as people reacted to Holden in the novel. Holden was considered a rebellious, ungrateful, disrespectful teenager that, although rare, is a worldwide epidemic. But if you see past the narrow-minded view that people tend to look through, the book is a testament that this rebellious teenager is a person. The book shows that Holden, although a sarcastic, nasty, unlikable guy, is a person inside who is just trying to save the virtue of innocence.

Holden sees the world as perverted and narrow, and has a nervous breakdown when he sees innocent children about to fall of the cliff. This cliff is a thought of Holden's of which he states when asked what he wants to be when he grows up. Holden says that he wants to be a catcher in the rye. He envisions children playing on a field of rye, and next to this field there's a cliff. Holden would catch the children if they didn't look where they were going and accidentally ran off the cliff. There is incredible symbolism in this statement. The children represent childhood innocence and purity. The cliff, or what lies below it, represents the tainted, impure "game" of life, in which so many people have fallen. These people, the phonies, are what Holden despises most. Holden demonstrates his desire to save innocence when he finds that someone's written "f*** you" on a schoolhouse wall. "I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them- all cockeyed, naturally- what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days." Holden rubbed the mark off, and felt extreme hatred toward the person who wrote it.

Holden hated everything. Everything he held sacred turned out to be a disappointment. A girl in which he thought was innocent and pure turned out to be "given the time" by a suave roommate of his. Another girl whom he dated was such a phony it almost made him vomit. He gets roughed up when a disgruntled pimp comes around to collect more than Holden owed for a prostitute whom he didn't even have sex with. An old teacher that finally understood where Holden was coming from turns out to be a pervert when he's found patting Holden's head in the middle of the night. Nothing sacred and nothing pure, and the worse part was that Holden was, self-admittedly, too "yellow-belly" to do anything about these things. A boy lost in a sick world, helpless to its evil, and yet Holden's the crazy one? Holden speaks the brutal truth, and admires others who do. For example, Holden said that he really admired this kid, James, that Holden knew, who said that another kid, Phil, was a conceited jerk. Phil was much bigger, and he and six other jerks went into scrawny James' room and beat him up, wanting him to take back his comments. James never took it back, but instead, decided to jump out a window to his death.

A key factor that made this book enjoyable was the style in which its monologue was written. This book is definitely not an English teacher's dream when it comes to grammar, sentence structure, etc. But the dialect, risque even by today's standards, conveys a feeling of reality that is not obtainable by any other literary device I know of. Holden's sarcasm, humorous attitude, and flat out bluntness had me laughing page after page. This line, chosen at random, demonstrates Holden's attitude and dialect, "You should've seen the way they said hello. You'd have thought they hadn't seen each other in twenty years. You'd have thought they'd taken baths in the same bathtub or something when they were little kids. Old buddyroos. It was nauseating. The funny part was, they probably met each other just once, at some phony party. Finally, when they were all done slobbering around, old Sally introduced me."

So why is A Catcher in the Rye a great book? I think what makes a great book great is its ability to communicate with the reader. Every teenager I know can easily relate to Holden Caulfield's situation. The book is a comfort if you're a teen feeling the same things as Holden, criticizing the world and its occupants. Holden Caulfield is a hero that wasn't afraid to speak his mind. He taught me that your criticisms of the world are not invalid, and that there is nothing that you can say that is so bad that you have to repress it. Holden made me feel a little less alone. He made me feel like there were others in this predicament that we call adolescence.


overrated   January 3, 2006
 29 out of 44 found this review helpful

This book first came to my attention when I was in eighth grade (1979 or 1980 if that matters) and watching an episode of the "Lou Grant" TV show. The episode was about book burning and censorship in general. Catcher in the Rye was one of the books that was mentioned by name as inspiring hatred in some groups of people (along with Slaughterhouse Five, and a certain editions of the Dictionary which contained "dirty" words). Rossie (one of Lou Grant's star journalists) picked up Catcher in the Rye out of the pile and said he couldn't believe anyone would want to ban it, and that book helped him survive his teenage years. Naturally after seeing the episode, I went out to the local Library to try and find and read all of these forbidden books for myself, to see what was so bad about them.

I read it at age 13, and just did not get it at all. I mainly didn't understand what a "phoney" was in the context that Holden Caulfield was using that word, and didn't understand how a person of his age could have so much freedom (to stay in a hotel on his own, wander around New York City on his own) and still do nothing but whine and complain.

We were assigned to read the book in my Sophomore year in high school, and even with the benefit of being two years older, I still didn't appreciate the literary value of it. Holden was just a insufferable whiner in my opinion, and I couldn't identify with him whatsoever. I decided it must be a baby-boomer thing.

It wasn't until I read "Less Than Zero" by Brett Easton Ellis in the late 80's that I got a clue to why baby boomers loved Catcher in the Rye so much. One of the reviews of Less Than Zero quoted on the back cover said "... this is a Catcher in the Rye for our time...". Less Than Zero was one of the most raw, shocking, disturbing books I had ever come across, and it made me think that maybe in the early 1950's when The Catcher in the Rye was published, it was raw, shocking and disturbing to audiences at the time. If that's the case, then I can understand why it holds a special place in the heart of baby boomers, and people from that generation.

Even so, Holden Caulfield will always be an insufferable whiner as far as I'm concerned.