Did Salinger Go Awry?

James Earl Jones? That's the first time I've heard him primarily referred to as Vader's voice actor. It's a commonly known factoid, but he's very well known otherwise.

This is the most common reaction I've heard over the years to that book. Perhaps because it's jammed down everyone's throats in high school English classes. Perhaps it's the coming of age book of a certain generation, which feels wrong to the next that takes all its observations for granted.

I didn't get it either, why this book is so beloved of literature teachers.

My high school english teacher, wonderful woman, always said that Holden was "just stupid."

Not in a way to devalue the literature, but as a character trait.

I actually really liked that analysis. The way forward for Holden is to get over himself and stop wallowing in his past. (Spoiler: he doesn't). She really cut to the chase, in a way a lot of teenagers probably need to hear.

I’m a high school English teacher, and I’ve never liked it. Didn’t like it in high school; don’t care for it now (and don’t teach it).

Probably could burn less virtual karma if you made your comment more interesting by saying WHY you hated it. The plot? The characters? The typesetting? The pages gave you paper-cuts? Tell us Why!

Not a big fan of it either, though it's important to recognize that given the era it was released (early 1950s), it was quite ahead of its time. Perhaps ahead by at least 2 decades in anticipating American youth's punk culture, that we see from the mid-70s onward.

As a side note, you might give his later Franny and Zooey (1961) a try, finding a more nuanced Salinger at work.

> I will probably burn all my virtual karma, but I just need to say this: I hated Catcher in the Rye with a passion. I used to do a lot of reading, still do my fair share, but just could not stand that book.

There's a very short window in which one can read Catcher for the first time and still enjoy it. It's that 3 year window between 13ish and 16 where you've just begun having all these angsty thoughts about the world, yet have no context or understanding for them. Outside of that, it just comes off as a whiny entitled kid doing nothing. But within that context, it's a seminal coming of age story. I can distinctly remember the ending being the first work of art to move me to tears.

One of the problems is that it seems to have created a trope of "young genius author creates a single amazing work and is troubled" which is used in some dire films.

Ruby Sparks, The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, Chasing Holden, there's a bunch of them and they suck.

https://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/sidney-hall-review-sundanc...

I wonder if you would change your mind if you thought about the fact that Holden wasn’t just an angsts teen but a victim of sexual abuse? IMO that changes the whole read

I will probably go down in flames with you, because I felt the same, though I liked his other works like Franny & Zooey.

Catcher was full of slang that I simply couldn't relate to. For me, it wasn't that different from reading Shakespeare in high school...focusing on interpreting the language got in the way of my ability to empathize.

Not a fan either, but I also didn't read it until I was over 30 and couldn't stomach the narrator. I think most of my friends who recommended it had read it when they were teenagers not as adults.

For anyone who just can’t connect to this book, or doesn’t “get” it, maybe this quote will help. I read the book as a kid and liked it, but when I reread it as an adult this passage stopped me dead in my tracks and I cried; damn near sobbed. In my view, it’s the very center of the entire narrative.

> My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren't just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I'll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I'd see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence--there was this fence that went all around the course--and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That's the kind of red hair he had. God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair. I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while when it rains and all, and I can't make a real fist any more-- not a tight one, I mean--but outside of that I don't care much. I mean I'm not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway.

I felt the same way when they sang Imagine at New Years 2019 in Times Square. America is still stuck in the mid 20th century.