Caught

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

This book is one which many read in school, and until I had read it, I wondered whether that was caused by anything beyond the relative simplicity of its language and its brief length — the easier to teach, the better to cram before assessment.

That view was born of incurious ignorance, and it was incorrect. From the first page, it’s clear this book is stamped indelibly with the mark of a ‘twentieth century classic’, however defined. It has all the visible signs. A terseness of language; a distinctive, demotic lexicon which looks increasingly dated as its slang slides further away in time; a certain jaundiced perspective; and above all, the seeming use of a small, even insignificant story to illuminate what teachers call ‘universal themes’ — experienced either personally or socially.

Now, that’s a relatively bland introduction, but I can only work with what I’m given. The book’s self-consciously a classic, and could have been nothing else. There would have been no reason to print it otherwise. It is a classic also for the same reason Lord of the Flies is a classic, and Of Mice and Men is a classic — each have a pocket-sized narrative, strong emotions, and rattling good story-telling.

Salinger mentions other writers so I might as well do, too. Gatsby is a classic because of its extraordinary beauty, and A Farewell to Arms because of the totality and earth-shaping power of Hemingway’s iron-hard worldview, to which one can either be seduced or which one is compelled to reject, and the blunt novelty of his description (‘Nick watched his father's hands scrubbing each other with the soap’ — in ‘Indian Camp’; and ‘As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away’ — A Moveable Feast: both of which I will never forget).

In those other novels, things actually happened, and there was more than one notable character. In Salinger’s case, he was able to mint a classic in which almost nothing happens, and there is only one character. One character, indeed, who is a terrible bore.

No doubt any review of The Catcher in the Rye (at least one which is not some metacommentary or exposition of a pet theory) is in effect a review of the protagonist, Holden Caulfield. He tells the reader the story; it’s exclusively his story, told in his own voice, and inflected entirely with his view of the world. 

It’s all a bit of a drag — being Caulfield, at least. He is kicked out of his snobby private school (not for the first time, nor the first school). His fellow students treat him shabbily and one of them bloodies his nose. The cabbies whose cars he occupies think he’s nuts. Waiters refuse to serve him booze and to pass his notes to musicians. He is shaken down for money by a fat pimp and punched hard in the chest for his trouble. One of his brothers is dead. His parents despair. 

Caulfield lies to everyone, all the time. He does this in part for expediency, partly because he is temperamentally young for his years, and partly because he views the world with such misery. It is populated by phonies and freaks. Entertainment is no balm. The movies, for example. Caulfield despises the movies. His big-shot writer brother — not the dead one — lives in Hollywood now and produces film scripts. This tears him up inside.

It is no bad thing that Caulfield is so hateful, of course. Nor that he would be, if you met him, profoundly dull to speak to, tedious to be with. He admits some of his flaws — directionlessness, a certain mawkishness, cowardice — but not the others which the reader can plainly see: that he is spoilt by his upbringing; that he is faker in his own way than the phonies he sees all around him; and that even if he believes in nothing and is therefore free from hypocrisy, he still manages to be destructive and spiteful when even the path of least resistance would take him sailing beyond such pettiness — and even stupider than he himself admits.

What matters more than this is the character of the novel itself. Is it accurate?

Is it written like a young-for-his-years cynic, a prudish pervert, a jaded sentimentalist — and so on? It clearly is, to Salinger’s credit. Every word seems effective in furthering Caulfield’s character. All the repetition and vituperation of his description, the naturalisms imported from talk (‘old Phoebe’, ‘boy was I’, ‘I almost puked, to tell you the truth’), all the shambling weakness of his actual speech when written down.

Part of the effectiveness of the book is in its evocation of a mood — a mood so teenage it might be easy to bury all recognition beneath retrospective shame and weight the years that followed. It’s captured so truly that it’s hard to examine — so horrifying it prompts embarrassed self-reflection. 

Perhaps the point of the book is not so much the creation and sustaining of this mood than the melancholy and anomie it leaves the reader with — not the sense, in one who is no longer a child, that he has been understood; but rather the sadness in perceiving that this kind of undirected nihilism seems a close to a universal experience. It is maybe meant to be heart-breaking, and in that possible aim it almost succeeds. 

Caulfield's foolishness aside, however, there is no deep tragic note upon which the story ends. The boy is simply condemned to more of the same. How unlike, in one essential way, a fine Salinger short story, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ — a little better, and briefer, than this short classic of a novel.