#94: The Catcher in the Rye

Like any decent book lover, I had already read J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.  Considering the first reading was 15 years in the past, however, I read it again.  Not only to remain true to the "100 Book Challenge", but I wondered how my perspective on the book had changed now that I'm a crotchety, old 30-something with at least one school-age child of my own.  What I really wondered is, had I been around when this book was published in 1951, would I have gone arm-to-arm with other paranoid parents, burning copies of the book on the library's front steps?

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  While the book is still entertaining, it's rebellious influence is a tad outdated.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:

#100: Gone with the Wind

Well, I made it.  I just spent eight days in Civil War-torn Georgia with Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.  I'm tired, I'm downtrodden, and I'm heartbroken.  I'm so upset that I almost don't want to talk about it and just cast this post aside with a flip of my hair and a promise to think of everything tomorrow.  But I'm no "Scarlett".


What I Loved... 
was the incredibly rich, historical detail.  If you have only seen the movie, you haven't come close to revealing the true historical significance of Gone With the Wind.  It was published in 1936, and author Margaret Mitchell wasn't even born until almost 40 years after the setting for this book, so one wonders:  How did she get her information?  Well, it's rumored that she spent seven years writing the book and a further eight months just on research.  She was also raised in Georgia amid a hoard of Civil War veterans.  I'm guessing she picked up a thing or two.  

Being aYankee myself, it's easy for me to take the Civil War's impact for granted.  Our history textbooks say we freed the slaves and a war was fought, which appears momentous enough.  It seems a charming one-liner to justify a good cause.  But ugh, wars are so much uglier when you start looking at them more closely!  Worse, the lines of wrong and right, instead of getting clearer, just tend to become blurrier when examined under a microscope.  Yes!  The South needed to give up its slaves!  But did the North really have to crush them, ground them into the red dirt that they loved so much?  If the North was 100% pure in its motivations for war, why did the blacks still face so much discrimination in the northern territories?  Maybe Rhett Butler was right when he said,

“It isn’t the darkies, Scarlett. They’re just the excuse. There’ll always be wars because men love wars. Women don’t, but men do--yea, passing the love of women.” 

But maybe Scarlett was right:

When she looked at Tara she could understand, in part, why wars were fought. Rhett was wrong when he said men fought wars for money. No, they fought for swelling acres, softly furrowed by the plow, for pastures green with stubby cropped grass, for lazy yellow rivers and white houses that were cool amid magnolias. These were the only things worth fighting for, the red earth which was theirs and would be their sons’, the red earth which would bear cotton for their sons and their sons’ sons.

What I Hated...
was the obvious, prevailing racism in the book.  Like when Scarlett's old friend, Tony Fontaine says:


“But the worst thing was the way he kept the darkies stirred up. If anybody had told me I’d ever live to see the day when I’d hate darkies! Damn their black souls, they believe anything those scoundrels tell them and forget every living thing we’ve done for them. Now the Yankees are talking about letting the darkies vote. And they won’t let us vote. Why, there’s hardly a handful of Democrats in the whole County who aren’t barred from voting, now that they’ve ruled out every man who fought in the Confederate Army. And if they give the negroes the vote, it’s the end of us. Damn it, it’s our state! It doesn’t belong to the Yankees! By God, Scarlett, it isn’t to be borne! And it won’t be borne! We’ll do something about it if it means another war. Soon we’ll be having nigger judges, nigger legislators--black apes out of the jungle--”

It makes my skin crawl.  But then I remember, Margaret Mitchell isn't telling me that I should be racist, she is merely giving us a reflection of the South during the Civil War and wrong as it may be, that's how it was and to gloss it over is to be ignorant. 

In addition to racism, another thing that bothered me was Scarlett's complete disinterest in others (with the exception of Ashley) and more importantly, her lack of feeling toward her children.  Like when her "favorite" child dies, Scarlett says that she wishes it was her other daughter!  What kind of mother wishes that?  The memory of her unloved children will haunt me.


And then, of course, there was Rhett's complete disrespect and meanness.  Yes, I felt the customary sadness at the end when he vows to leave and says he doesn't love her anymore, but through the majority of the book, I was appalled at how he treated her!  It serves him right that he got his heart broken, if you ask me.  And why did the book end like it did?  Because Scarlett always gets what she wants and of course, we know that they will reconcile, with time, and live a boring, happy life from that moment forward.  At least, that's what I'm telling myself. :)

What's Next?
Sir Aruthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I couldn't be more relieved.  After spending eight days breaking my heart with Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, I really need a Sherlock Holmes mystery, with an ensured happy ending, to brighten my mood.  Mysteries always end well, don't they?  Don't they??

The Great Gatsby

About books, there is a rule that I have always followed:  If I remember it, it's good.  Most books, while they may engross you in the moment, seem to blend together with the others as soon as you place them on the shelf.  Plots have been redone so many times that some argue that no writer is even capable of having an original storyline anymore.  While I do not pretend that I have read every book in existence, I still continue to be surprised by the occasional, original idea.  F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which I first read when I was sixteen, is one of those memorable books, and for this, I celebrate Fitzgerald's genius.  That does not mean I like it.

Don't get excited.  I did not say I hate it.  Fitzgerald has a way of writing that makes you feel as if everything is beautiful, even the ugly.  He makes me want to slip into the body of even the horrid Myrtle Wilson just so that I could be a character that intrigued him.  The way he writes, it seems that he would have been a man with whom women often fell in love because they would long to be one of his female characters and know that, no matter the woman's flaws, he would also uncover the beauty.  It is said that his wife, Zelda Sayre, was his muse.  I wonder how closely she resembles Daisy.  I read that Zelda refused Fitzgerald's first proposal of marriage because he she did not want to be poor as a writer's wife.  Hmmm...

Not just the characters, but The Great Gatsby excels in its scenery and innuendos.  The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg clearly represent the eyes of God, seeing all but without interference.  To Gatsby, the green light at the end of Daisy's dock represents Daisy herself.  His every action is an effort to win her affection and love in the same way that a ship at sea is guided by its lighthouse.  Furthermore, Gatsby was so obsessed with Daisy that I wonder if his "last swim" wasn't really just a suicide attempt.  Perhaps he and Wilson had a nice little chat, became fast friends, and Wilson did him a favor.  Like the lost ship out of sight of the lighthouse, neither man could have existed without the woman he loved.  (How ironic that of the two other central male characters, Nick seemed unable to love any woman while Tom appeared able to love them all!)  Regardless, every page seems to add another layer to hidden nuances.  Although his phrases may appear frivolous on the first reading, further examination reveals that Fitzgerald was a writer who wasted few words, for he intended significance in every line.  While reading The Great Gatsby, I underlined descriptions and constantly reread pages--not because the book is difficult to understand, but because I did not want to miss anything.      

Another credit to the book is the era.  F. Scott Fitzgerald was fortunate to produce this book in the 1920's, and yet, I wonder, could The Great Gatsby have been centered in any other time?  Was there another moment in history that offered the same opportunities of fortune and carelessness?  Here in the early 21st century, do those with long histories of wealth cling to rigid, societal rules (although they hypocritically defy them in private), and snobbily refrain from association with the "newly rich", the celebrities, the poor, and the non-Aryan?  Maybe so, but from what I gather, the "Daisy"s of the 21st century resemble Paris Hiltons.  Less conservative and, certainly, less dependent on men. 

Let's face it, if Fitzgerald wrote the book today, Daisy would have either run off with Gatsby when he was young and poor and told her parents to screw off, or she would have divorced Tom years ago and bought her own mansion with the settlement money.  Then, when she did cross Gatsby's path again, and he told her about his obsession for her for five years, she would have slapped him with a restraining order.  Women today are a lot more cynical, and Gatsby is clearly not in his right mind.

Every time I read one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books or short stories, I feel like there should have been more to it.  There are too many unsolved mysteries in The Great Gatsby:  What the hell did Gatsby do for a living? Did Daisy ever love Gatsby?  They seem so oddly matched, did Tom ever really love Myrtle?  At the end, was Tom buying jewelry for another woman? Whatever happened to Nick, or Jordan?  What happened to the dog in the apartment?  Who inherited Gatsby's fortune?  He was such a nice guy, why didn't anyone come to Gatsby's funeral?  I always feel like Fitzgerald opens plot lines that he never closes, but what repels me from a book, seems to also be its virtue.  Like I said, I didn't forget The Great Gatsby as soon as I turned the last page.  On the contrary, I will probably end up reading it again someday.  I'm sure all the answers are in there somewhere... 

 

Flowers for Algernon

My English teacher made us read this in high school, so I groaned inwardly (like a student receiving an assignment) when I picked this one up. In the introduction, I had to read the inserted quote from Plato’s The Republic three times before I had a theory to its meaning. Kinda ironic. Anyway, see for yourself:

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.

Yeah, it was the last part that got me, too. I think what he’s saying is that we shouldn’t laugh or feel pity for the blind man until we know his story. Maybe, being oblivious is a good thing. On the other hand, if he did have his sight at one point, and he lost it, how bad would that suck? The last thing in the world that he would want is your laughter or your pity.

Drawing on my apathetically-inspired memories of the book from high school and the crappy movie we watched afterwards, I remembered little. I knew Charlie Gordon was mentally-handicapped. He gets smart. There’s a mouse, Algernon. Charlie likes his teacher. Then something goes wrong, and he goes back to being his normal self again. Nothing else must have hit me as being very significant because that all I remembered.  It’s a weird experience when a wiser woman revisits the footsteps of the past. I know it sounds dramatic, but in a way it was. I rarely ever read books twice. To me, re-reading Flowers for Algernon was like stepping into those white K-Swiss sneakers I wore when I was fifteen.  I remembered my foolish interpretations and mocked my old self for themes in the book that I had completely missed before.  I even blushed a few times while reading sections that would have embarrassed the hell out of me as a kid.  In my own weird way, I identified with the smart Charlie who imagines his former self peering in from the shadows.  The handicapped Charlie (15-year-old me) yearns to find meaning in things he can't (I couldn't) understand, while the smarter Charlie (the present me) desires to reconnect and make sense with his (my) past and former self. And I thought about how stupid I was when I was 15, and how I sure as hell wouldn’t want to go back…or would I?

What are some of the things I missed when I read it the first time? Um, like how horrible Charlie's mother was to him, and how, as a mother, it tears me up inside to think about it. Charlie was a child who could barely care for himself. He was lonely in a world of people and things he couldn’t fully comprehend. All he needed in the world was someone to love him and to accept him and to guide him. That’s all he needed. It’s weird to think about it, but isn’t that the mother’s dream? To hold onto your child, never see them go out in the world and meet dangerous people and face dangerous situations, and just keep them by your side forever because all they'll ever need in the world is your love and caring and affection. Some would see it as a curse, and in a way, it is. What mother doesn’t want some independence every once in a while? I mean, c’mon. But to think that a mother could abuse and beat such a child, banish him from the house and wish for his death, ugh, it makes me sick! He cringed and whimpered when she came into the room. He expected beatings when he should have gotten kisses and hugs. She made him feel like he was always bad, never doing anything right, and a burden.  I know. I know. It’s just a fictional story. That would placate me if it weren’t for the fact that I know these things happen in the real world, too. It’s one of the afflictions of having the ability to see and decipher what goes on around me.

I found it amusing that Charlie became more depressed with each IQ point he gained. Like Plato suggested, maybe it isn’t so bad to not be able to see. Before the experiment, Charlie didn’t know that his “friends” were laughing at him and making fun of him. He didn’t know what a horrible person his mother really was or how she screwed with him mentally. His misinterpretations lead him to adopt a comfortable understanding of his experiences, and he seemed unable to recall anything truly unpleasant. It wasn’t until he became more aware that he saw that he really didn’t have any friends at all. His doctors weren’t the geniuses he imagined them to be. His mother and sister hated him while his dad never intervened enough to really make a difference. He was lonely, and as an added bonus, he became so smart at one point that people became unable to connect or speak to him at all.

There was a brief moment when he was going upwards in intelligence (and another when he was going down again) when he could relate to others, and it was during these times that a romance sparked between Charlie and his teacher, Alice Kinnian. Based on my school-girl memories, I expected it to be so much more gripping than it actually was. Honestly, this time, it was just hard to believe. I found myself wishing I could have a heart-to-heart with Alice and ask her if she had gone insane. Fall in love with someone who is as emotionally mature as an 8-year-old? Ewww. It makes me shudder to think of the confused images the not-smart Charlie holds in his memories.

To sum it up, I loved this book. It made me want to hug my children, to cherish what I have and know, to feel grateful for my past, and to pity myself a little bit because I can’t be so happily ignorant—not that I’m wishing for that or anything. Now that I know what I know, I’d always feel like I was missing something if I suddenly got hit by a bus and lost my senses. And I don't think I'd ever be fooled if someone tried to humor me.  I'd just want to be treated like everyone else.  Just as Charlie feels at the end of the book. Even though I love this book, I do have one warning about it: Do Not Read While Suicidal. It is quite depressing, but it’s worth it to have your eyes opened just a little more to a corner of the world so often cast in shadows. I have a feeling that, had Charlie retained his abilities, he would read it.