"The Catcher in the Rye" is now, you'll be told just about anywhere you ask, an "American classic," right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading "The Catcher in the Rye" after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil. ... quoth Jonathan Yardley.
Haven't read either. Anyone want to take a stab at defending the duo and convincing me that it would be a worthwhile use of my time?
Posted by Alan Allport at October 23, 2004 01:38 PMCalling Salinger's prose "execrable" is just silly. That said, Catcher in the Rye is one of those immensley over-rated books that remains highly thought of largely because it is ideal grist for high school English courses.
It's not the only one that gets this treatment. If you look at the typical American high school classics (i.e., the ones that are assigned all the time), there are a lot of pretty bad books in there.
High school teachers are under pressure to assign books which they think their students will enjoy. Catcher in the Rye fits that criterion perfectly. High school English teachers also tend to be fairly conservative in their tastes, and tend to accept unquestioningly a book's reputation. This might be partly because they don't feel like they are truly experts and tend to defer to others on questions of literary merit.
It is strange, though, that this high school canon exerts such an influence on literary culture in America. I can't recall hearing Catcher in the Rye (or To Kill a Mockingbird, for that matter) praised or even discussed outside of high school, yet a book critic for the Washington Post still feels the need to excoriate it.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at October 23, 2004 02:20 PMI read Catcher at around age 16, and remember finding it enjoyable but sophomoric. The sort of thing you read and realize that you've partly outgrown already.
It was still better than Old Man and the Sea, though. I remember that furnishing an excuse for a mini-vaction for my 9th grade English teacher, since she could put a record of the book on, and simply sit at her desk for a week. That and The Pearl (also required reading) put me off Hemingway for 14 years,until I discovered his short stories during a nasty bout with the flu.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at October 23, 2004 08:19 PMI'd probably read *The Catcher In the Rye* more critically now than I did in my early teens, but actually I don't quite think it makes sense for teachers to assign coming-of-age novels to students who are in fact coming of age. When difficult events are going on in your life you can never draw the correct conclusions at the time. ;-) Seems to me adolescence as a literary topic doesn't really make sense until you're fairly well beyond the stuff yourself. Dunno -- I'm one of the few kids who didn't read that book for a class & maybe teacherly exegesis would have led to a different conclusion. But for those who did study it in school, well, did you absorb any useful life lessons or gather any pleasant sense of fellow-feeling from Mr. Caulfield's travails?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at October 24, 2004 07:08 AMI had the good fortune (how else can I spin it all these years later?) of being forced to read very few books in my youth. What I mean is that the public education system did not take advantage of the opportunity it had then to kill whatever interest I had in decent writing.
Catcher and The Old Man didn't get my attention until I was well into my 30's. The Old Man still seems pretty awful. My guess is that high school teachers assign it because you cannot not teach American literature without bringing Hemingway into it, and if you must teach Hemingway to young people you must also avoid the drinking and whoring in the work that actually had an impact on 20th century writing. The Old Man apparently means "something", although what it is I'm not sure other than to instruct us that a loss of talent does not necessarily mean you're washed up. My comment to teachers would be if you must teach books with a "message" you should stick with the moral banalities of Steinbeck's lesser work.
Catcher charmed me as an adult, and I still enjoy it every five years or so. My seventeen year old daughter had to read it as a summer assignment and she told me she loved it. And I thought that all was well in the world when, better than 50 years after it's publication, this little book still offered young people something they could "get".
Good books are not about sentence structure, bullet proof plots, consistent characterizations, and a perfect ear for dialect. Like all art they are part of the story of humankind's struggle to come to terms with its existence. If Catcher in the Rye still has the power to induce a few more young folks to take up that struggle, then god bless it.
Nice to hear from you, Bobby.
Funny about *Old Man...* -- the main memory I have of it after all these years is the sense of futility: ya can't win, ya can't break even, etc. Depressing as hell for impressionable kids. Unless they're gonna grow up to be Red Sox fans of course. You're probably right tho about the reasons why that's the Hemingway story that gets taught to kids.
BTW we saw a small bull-running event in France a couple weeks ago &, yes, when bulls are introduced to each other they really do form a herd just like Hemingway said. In the place we were at, a group of five broke down both sides of a fence in the ring & forced two amateur daredevils to stand on the top rail to avoid them. Exciting stuff, it really is. Of course the drunken rednecks driving around afterwards in junker cars were much scarier, but that's another part of the story...
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at October 24, 2004 02:18 PMBut for those who did study it in school, well, did you absorb any useful life lessons or gather any pleasant sense of fellow-feeling from Mr. Caulfield's travails?
My reaction to Catcher was, well, basically exasperation. I could relate to some of what Caulfield thought and went through, but I also thought he was a bit of an ass. And to my teenage mind the big metaphorical payoff at the end was almost laughable. Like, you know, book's almost over, last chance to get literary on the reader.
I also seem to remember being slightly annoyed that the book was supposed to appeal to me, and that I was supposed to like Holden. I was way too rebelious at that age to fall for that one. Holden probably wouldn't've, either. And Holden went to a prep school. At that age I had enough class resentment to think that anyone better off than me had no excuse to suffer.
So, I think that's a "no".
I've never read Old Man, but I agree that the short stories are where it's at. "Big, Two-Hearted River" is one of the great stories of that century.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at October 24, 2004 05:10 PMI also seem to remember being slightly annoyed that the book was supposed to appeal to me, and that I was supposed to like Holden.That brings back a more distinct memory, thanks. Yes, it was strange to wonder if Persons My Age were supposed to like this boy. Especially for a female reader -- here's a kid who looks for individuality by trying on not only garden-variety profanity but a greedy, "worldly" sexual coarseness about women. How is a *girl* supposed to identify with this grabby little snot? Pat him on the head, maybe; suspect that he's really a nicer person than he's trying to be, maybe. But *identify*, no. I think actually the book is useful for learning how literature works, but mainly because it introduces the notion of the unreliable narrator. It probably is the first book a lot of kids read where the hero has to be understood from outside his own account of himself. Suppose the other one like that in the school curriculum is *Flowers for Algernon*. Do they still teach that one? Posted by: Martha Bridegam at October 25, 2004 08:01 AM
I read the "Catcher in the Rye" when I was fourteen only because it was banned. My school banned alot of books during a censorship frenzy - The Hobbit, Franny and Zoe, Nine Stories, Lysastrada etc. At the time I though Holden was a total whiner. He never would have survived the anti-intelectual and xenophobic school I attended. I've never re-read it though and probably should.
The only Hemingway I ever read in high school was "A Clean Well Lighted Place". Our AP English course got some sort of dispensation and we were allowed to read "questionable" material.
Posted by: Barbara A. MacDonald at October 25, 2004 09:59 AMWhat on earth did they ban *The Hobbit* for?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at October 25, 2004 11:02 AM>I read the "Catcher in the Rye" when I was fourteen only
>because it was banned. My school banned alot of books during
>a censorship frenzy -
My high school also banned _Catcher_ in the '60s, as too 'risky' (i.e., risque). I've still not read it, although as an undergrad lit major one does absorb things from the atmosphere.
We did read _The Old Man and the Sea_ in high school and I remember being (callow youth that I was) immensely bored with it--but not nearly so much as with the (in my opinion) very worst of the 'modern classics' inflicted on kids, Steinbeck's _Travels with Charley_.
I have re-read _Old Man_ as an adult, however, and am somewhat surprised now by the unfavorable comments it is receiving in this discussion. I see it as a masterpiece of early '50s (late post-war) Existentialism, in which Hemingway's famous terse style is perfectly apt. Such a work is extremely rare in American literature of the period and, indeed, it probably would not have been possible at all had E.H. not spent so much time when, where and how he did in Europe, earlier.
Posted by: Henry Larsen at October 26, 2004 11:20 PMI'll concede that Old Man was a step up from Across the River and Into the Trees.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at October 27, 2004 07:25 AMI e-mailed my high school English teacher and she said that the late eighties were the dark years at my rural Pennsylvania Dutch farming community high school. (Although I could have told you that part.)
There was a right wing Christian School Board in power and they decided that The Hobbit was very "counter-culture" and presented a positive portrayal of drugs and alcohol.
Posted by: Barbara A. MacDonald at October 27, 2004 08:06 AMAh, the silly "pipe-weed" theory -- even though IIRC the book's closing words are "...handing him the tobacco-jar," which to me makes clear that Tolkien had nothing illicit in mind. But then I suppose tobacco wasn't popular with them either. So was the school board run by Plymouth Brethren or wot? Funny, really, considering how strongly Tolkien's Catholicism underlies the book. Or maybe not: as a kid in Pottstown ca. 1920 my grandmother was taught that "the Catholics" were dangerous furriners who would "get" everyone some fine day.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at October 27, 2004 02:25 PMGiven that Tolkein's reactionary anarchism wasn't all that far from the Pat Buchanan wing of the GOP, you'd think he'd be all the rage amongst certain school boards these days.
Posted by: Alan Allport at October 27, 2004 02:37 PMI am a seventeen year old girl who can relate well to Holden. It is a good story of getting lost trying to grow up, not a whinny life lesson. And a reply to "At that age I had enough class resentment to think that anyone better off than me had no excuse to suffer:" just because you are "well-off" doesn't mean you are happy. The most interesting conlict, to me, is an internal one, because it is the hardest to discover.
Posted by: Jean at April 7, 2005 01:21 PM