I first read Catcher in the Rye when I was about 16. I loved it. I kept it in moderate to heavy rotation for a good decade.

How could I not love a book about an intelligent and sensitive and basically decent young post-adolescent male, driven to madness by the insanity of the world his ancestors and elders had made? He didn’t make it!

So he bails/gets ejected from his fourth or fifth prep school, and goes on a self-destructive rampage, which I could understand, because I’d done the same kind of thing from time to time, though not on such a grandiose scale (yet).

And he’s hard on himself and on the people around him, because he’s frantic, he’s frantically trying to find, to experience, something real, for God’s sake.

And what he hates more than anything, what quite literally drives him crazy, is the lies, the hypocrisy, the falseness of it all. The phonies.

And Salinger can just nail a description of those phonies and can make you laugh at them, and make you feel it, too, make you seethe with anger. He could do that to me, anyway, and to anyone else I knew that read it.

I’m a little(!) older now. It’s still funny, it’s even still fun. The hypocrisy that so troubled me then still troubles me now and Salinger’s treatment of it hasn’t lost much over time.

But, in retrospect, I see that in many other ways my reactions to Catcher in the Rye had the all the fist-pumping enthusiasm, and all the thoughtful reflectiveness, of a frat-boy at a football game.

“Go, Holden!”

The story is disjointed and confusing. Characters come and go, never to be seen again. It’s the literary equivalent of MTV cinematography, which can only be justified by the story being told from a bed in a mental health facility, and even then, it’s pretty annoying. Holden just sort of moves through the world, bumping into scenery and other characters, and delivering his dreaded judgment: “Phony!”

My role model is the loudmouth kid from The Emperor’s New Clothes. I’m as ready as anybody to poke fun at and be angered by all the pretense, all the pompous dishonesty that permeates much of any society.

But this time around, I found myself revolted by Holden Caulfield.

He’s a jerk. He’s rude and obnoxious and selfish on a pretty much continual basis. His feelings for others range for the most part from contempt to disregard to horniness. He can’t control his baser emotions, nor his violent tendencies, attacking another student because of some bizarre internal chain of reasoning about sex and jealousy, and -- basically -- what a big phony the guy is.

He’s regretful after his mistreatment of other people, but then, so is almost any abuser. He rarely manages to say anything that might be construed as a sincere apology to the people he hurts.

And he’s not even an impressive jerk. The guy he attacks knocks him out. He’s not evil; he’s just petty and spiteful. He has no real direction, no real ambition, no real compunction about blaming the admittedly stultifying wasteland of contemporary American culture for his own laziness and lack of focus.

But he engages in verbal self-flagellation, saying everything I’ve just said about him and worse, in harsher terms and using lots of epinions forbidden words. He even admits he’s a ‘terrific liar.’

And that’s the biggest problem with Holden Caulfield; he’s at least as much a phony as anyone else in the story. He introduces the story with a bald-faced lie, that he’s not trying to make any kind of a point. He narrates repeated instances of his lies to other characters and to himself. You’re never quite sure, as the reader, if he’s telling you the truth.

And he’s a phony hero, because his answer, the answer of nihilism and despair, is not only not exactly the right answer. It is exactly the wrong answer.

In a rare moment of attempting to interact on some kind of human basis with his sister Phoebe, one of maybe 3 non-phony people in Holden’s world, he explains the book's title. Caulfield wants to be the Catcher in the Rye, the rye field with a cliff at the edge, catching children lest they fall, protecting the innocent, doing no harm, but only good.

But the field of rye with the cliff at the edge is a phony field with a phony cliff, and the job of catcher there is a phony job. If people really want to do good in this world, they’re not going to achieve that by whining and moaning and expecting to be handed everything they desire.

Everyone from Holden to Howard the Duck is “trapped in a world he never made.” But what matters is what you make of it, isn’t it?

I’ll always have a nostalgic soft spot in my heart for Catcher in the Rye. It’s something of a literary rite of passage, but it will never be the thrill for me that it was 20 years ago. I guess there’s a downside to that loss of innocence called aging. Apart from advancing physical decrepitude and death, I mean.







Recommended: Yes