My answer: Naaaah!
The gilded year of 1951 was a long a$$ time ago. While the book is still entertaining, it's rebellious influence is a tad outdated. Whoooo, he doesn't like school. Oh no, he doesn't want to conform?! Wow. Today's kids watch "16 and Pregnant" and die their hair blue. And personally, I don't want my kids to be conformist drones (not that I want them to be "16 and Pregnant" either, but blue is kind of a cool hair color.)
Yes, I will say it: I'm too young (for once) to truly understand the shockwaves The Catcher in the Rye caused in 1951. I was an 80's / 90's kid. I listened to Nirvana. Sex among high school students was a given, not an abomination. It was cool to wear "grunge" clothes and be at odds with society when I was a kid. Not all of us, but some (the cool ones) were actually raised to question what we were told.
Aha! I got it! Maybe my generation is partly the result of books like The Catcher in the Rye! Maybe my parents read it, and sparks went off in their pre-wired brains, and they thought, "Hey, right on Holden Caulfield! Groovy!"
And then, there were some who read the book and said, "I'm gonna kill somebody!" For instance, Mark David Chapman (killer of our beloved John Lennon), Robert John Bardo, and John Hinckley, Jr. were all said to have been influenced by this book. What the hell?
Just for fun, take the quiz: Which "The Catcher in the Rye" Killer Are You? There is the option of being completely sane, but if you do end up getting a "killer" result, perhaps The Catcher in the Rye is a book you had better leave on the shelf...
What I Loved...
I just loved how it's written. It's an enjoyable read that doesn't have me running to the dictionary every five seconds or popping ibuprofen to fight a migraine. I didn't have to read 35 history books to understand the references. I just read. And then, there are the little nuggets of completely useful advice for those of us, particularly those of us in our youth, who may be wandering in this life, wondering about our purpose or why we have to go to freaking school. Like when Holden goes to his old teacher, Mr. Antolini, and he says:
"Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it will begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that won’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”
Well said, Mr. Antolini!
What I Hated...
Okay, so I know that I was just going on and on about how nonconformity is a good thing. Blah, blah, blah. BUT Holden Caulfield doesn't conform to anything...except maybe innocence. Dr. Mahaffey makes the assessment that, while he strives to bypass adolescence and come into his manhood, he is really tortured by the loss of his own innocence. He has an obsession with his kid sister, Phoebe, and he desires to make a profession of watching kids play in the rye, so he can "catch" them before they go over a nearby cliff. He is constantly worried over children's corruption in this wide, horrible world and his plan is to rebel against it all. He is a never-ending complainer of what he has discovered in his almost-adulthood, and it gets a little annoying, not to mention the fact that it makes him completely and ridiculously insane. I KNOW! That was the purpose of the whole book! But I kinda just wanted to slap him.
Do you relate to Holden Caulfield a little too well? Take the quiz: Which "The Catcher in the Rye" Killer Are You? to find out!
What's Next?
I've been considering an upcoming visit to Italy, so I am SO EXCITED about Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard (or Il Gattopardo in Italian)! Sources say it may be the best Italian novel of all time, and it is historical fiction, which I love, love, love! Let's get a movie preview:
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