If you hated Holden Caulfield back in high school, you were experiencing The Catcher in the Rye as intended. Cold stoicism is baked so heavily into our upbringings that Holden’s inability to read a room or shut the fuck up is disgusting. Holden is a loathsome, whiney little crab on an exhausting trek across New York City. He often makes decisions that induce an immediate butt pucker response in teenage readers desperately convinced that they would never act so cringe in their own lives. Like so many protagonists in high school literature, his suffering is a direct affront to the ice cold self reliance mythologically greasing the wheels of a wealthy Tri-town. Holden is all too smug for somebody showing so much vulnerability. Why doesn’t he take this fantastic opportunity his parents are giving him and make some correct decisions for the first time in his life?
Well, I think I tried to argue as much in my essay for Mrs. Deorocki. I recall disagreeing with the premise of the assignment (the essay was likely to diagnose him with a mental illness), instead choosing to analyze how Holden’s various decisions lead him into trouble. Fortunately, that essay is lost to time. There were some serious miscommunications going on in sophomore English. We pretty much unanimously thought Holden was a helplessly annoying fuck, and Deorocki’s attempts to paint Holden as a rebellious hero fell on deaf ears. All the angles are a failure: how do you convince a bunch conservatively raised elitists afraid to upset their own helicopter parents to see a cringelord as a countercultural hero? And how do we convince this repressed, extremely depressed group of post-9/11 proto zoomers to feel anything for this cingelord’s depression. As far as we were concernced, Holden just needed to get a grip on himself and face the facts. We were coping, why couldn’t he? Loathing loathing loathing at Masco. On the counterculture angle… I think that’s just dated. Did people really ever resonate with the “phony” thing? Was that cool at some point? We 21st century zoomers were a lot more sophisticated than that. We also curated finstas… so perhaps not.
As an adult, it is a lot easier to disentangle oneself from the Holden nightmare and appreciate The Catcher in the Rye for what it is–an extremely well written novel loaded with bizarre, entertaining dialogue spurned on by the brief misadventure of an unwell kid. Salinger’s book is seriously entertaining to read, and the language is so plain that the pages flow like water. It’s like if Donald Trump monologued a coherent narrative. Here is a favorite passage of mine:
The cab I had was a real old one that smelled like someone’d just tossed his cookies in it. I always get those vomity kind of cabs if I go anywhere late at night. What made it worse, it was so quiet and lonesome out, even though it was Saturday night. I didn’t see hardly anybody on the street. Now and then you just saw a man and a girl crossing a street, with their arms around each other’s waists and all, or a bunch of hoodlumy-looking guys and their dates, all of them laughing like hyenas at something you could bet wasn’t funny. New York’s terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed. I kept wishing I could go home and shoot the bull for a while with old Phoebe. But finally,after I was riding a while, the cab driver and I sort of struck up a conversation. His name was Horwitz. He was a much better guy than the other driver I’d had. Anyway, I thought maybe he might know about the ducks.
“Hey, Horwitz,” I said. “You ever pass by the lagoon in Central Park? Down by Central Park South?”
“The what?“
“The lagoon. That little lake, like, there. Where the ducks are. You know.”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance?”
“Where who goes?”
“The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come around in a truck or something and take them away, or do they fly away by themselves–go south or something?”
Old Horwitz turned all the way around and looked at me. He was a very impatient-type guy. He wasn’t a bad guy, though. “How the hell should I know?” he said.
“How the hell should I know a stupid thing like that?”
“Well, don’t get sore about it,” I said. He was sore about it or something.
“Who’s sore? Nobody’s sore.”
I stopped having a conversation with him, if he was going to get so damn touchy about it. But he started it up again himself. He turned all the way around again, and said,
“The fish don’t go no place. They stay right where they are, the fish. Right in the goddam lake.”
“The fish–that’s different. The fish is different. I’m talking about the ducks,” I said.
“What’s different about it? Nothin’s different about it,” Horwitz said. Everything he said, he sounded sore about something. “It’s tougher for the fish, the winter and all, than it is for the ducks, for Chrissake. Use your head, for Chrissake.”
I didn’t say anything for about a minute. Then I said, “All right. What do they do, the fish and all, when that whole little lake’s a solid block of ice, people skating on it and all?”
Old Horwitz turned around again. “What the hellaya mean what do they do?” he yelled at me. “They stay right where they are, for Chrissake.”
“They can’t just ignore the ice. They can’t just ignore it.”
“Who’s ignoring it? Nobody’s ignoring it!” Horwitz said. He got so damn excited and all, I was afraid he was going to drive the cab right into a lamppost or something.
“They live right in the goddam ice. It’s their nature, for Chrissake. They get frozen right in one position for the whole winter.”
“Yeah? What do they eat, then? I mean if they’re frozen solid, they can’t swim around looking for food and all.”
“Their bodies, for Chrissake–what’sa matter with ya? Their bodies take in nutrition and all, right through the goddam seaweed and crap that’s in the ice. They got their pores open the whole time. That’s their nature, for Chrissake. See what I mean?” He turned way the hell around again to look at me.
“Oh,” I said. I let it drop. I was afraid he was going to crack the damn taxi up or something. Besides, he was such a touchy guy, it wasn’t any pleasure discussing anything with him. “Would you care to stop off and have a drink with me somewhere?” I said.
The book is loaded with gems like this interaction. It is a ridiculous, meandering narrative, but Salinger’s power of characterization transforms Holden’s seemingly pointless depression quest into a gripping novel.
I think the hatred that Holden invoked in my adolescent self deserves a deeper look. Perhaps you felt it too? Whether in Salinger’s time or our own, kids seem to always get to hating themselves. Why? Why?