Written by: J.D. Salinger
Published by: Little, Brown and Company
Part of the joy of reading a novel comes from stepping outside of your day-to-day life and slipping into the mind of someone else. For just a tiny sliver of a moment, real life no longer matters as you are whisked away to a world of wonder and intrigue. Without even leaving the safety of your bedroom, you can explore the crowded streets of New York with aplomb or stare out beyond the edge of the Abyss with a fetterless defiance. I would argue that there is no better outlet for the imaginative mind—movies and video games and drawings can’t even begin to compare with the infinite vastness of the written page. It’s why books are timeless; it’s also why they have endured for so long and why they will continue to endure long after you and I are long gone from the world.
A good book will hook you, absorb you, and keep you mostly interested; but a great book can go much further than that. A great book can help you decide what kind of person you are, or what kind of person you want to become. It can make you put some distance between your mind and your body, and you can ask yourself things like “Am I this person? Is this what I’m supposed to be?” A great book can transform you into a better, moar enlightened, moar attractive individual. It can imbue you with self-confidence. It can broaden your world view. It can teach you to love. It can teach you to hate. It can teach you to become someone else entirely.
The Catcher in the Rye is a great book, though it may not be immediately apparent on the surface. It tells a basic story from the perspective of an insufferable nitwit named Holden Caulfield, who decides to bum around New York City for a few days after getting expelled from school. He is a kid that has a lot of baggage in that he hates pretty much everything and everyone, constantly makes unfounded and unwarranted judgments about people that suggests a sophisticated lack of immaturity, and has the gall to wonder why people don’t want to listen to him. It is a book in which hardly anything happens, but also in which a lot of things happen, and it can be quite difficult to sit through if you find yourself unwilling, unprepared, or unable to analyze its nuances with any sort of depth.
Like many great literary works, it doesn’t spend much time establishing every minute detail of the scenery. It opts instead to carefully select just the right words and just the right tone of voice to keep the reader engaged. While visuals certainly exist, they are largely subdued in service of staying grounded inside this kid’s head. It’s an interesting risk to take; in today’s visual-hungry culture, a novel without much in the way of important and obvious visual cues seems very counterintuitive. But J.D. Salinger sets the stage not within the boundaries of the outside world, but within the trappings of Holden Caulfield’s mind. Rather than walking beside him as he crosses the street to the Museum of Natural History, we are that person who is walking across the street to the Museum of Natural History. We are that confused adolescentish boy who is perhaps afraid of growing into a man, who can’t believe that people exist who are going about their lives completely ignorant of the fact we exist at all or that the world is filled with all these phonies too phony to sit down and have an intelligent conversation about where all the ducks go in the winter time. We become him, in a way.
To read this novel and NOT be frustrated seems completely unnatural, if you ask me. Caulfield really is an insufferable twerp, even before his various cringe-worthy moments that throw an empathetic bone to his situation. Nonetheless, drastic changes to his personality definitely don’t occur overnight and he is prone to remain just as pathetic as he was prior to leaving school even well after the story concludes and just as liable to make the same mistakes over and over again. And yet, there is a persistent sliver of hope that things will eventually work out for the kid, that he’ll get his shit together, and maybe mend some terribly broken bridges along the way.
There is a little Holden Caulfield present in all of us, I think, and how we deal with him is an important capstone in defining who we are and who we will grow up to be. Will we accept the fact that we are no longer children and go out into the brave new world with a resolve to make it (and ourselves) better? Or will we withdraw into the realms of our own minds, portraying the world as lousy and phony and not up to our standards? If the latter is the case, should we be bothered to make a change? Is it even a problem at all? Whatever makes us happy and content, right?
A great book will do more than just tell us a good story. A great book will help us ask the questions we may forget to teach ourselves, even if it doesn’t try to offer any of the answers. We may realize that life has a lot more to offer than merely the innocence of youth or the complacency of adulthood, that maybe those two things can coexist comfortably in the middle. And then we can effectively step outside of ourselves, seeing assets and flaws objectively enough to become the people that we want to be (though not necessarily the people we are meant to be).
Or maybe we all could just get ourselves a Phoebe. She is super adorable and if you don’t let out a huge ‘awwwwwwwwwwww!!!’ when she shows up then you’re not a real human.
Choice Passages
“Women kill me. They really do. I don’t mean I’m oversexed or anything like that–although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean.”
“One thing I have, it’s a terrific capacity. I can drink all night and not even show it, if I’m in the mood.”
“All that crap they have in cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post and all, showing guys on street corners looking sore as hell because their dates are late–that’s bunk. If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.”
“‘You can’t just do something like that,’ old Sally said. She sounded sore as hell. ‘Why not? Why the hell not?’ ‘Stop screaming at me, please,’ she said. Which was crap, because I wasn’t even screaming at her. ‘Why can’tcha? Why not?'”
“I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.”
ThomFiles 