Catcher in the Rye

9/10

Published in 1951 by J.D. Salinger.

Spoiler review, as usual.

I had totally missed out on Catcher in the Rye—I had heard the title being thrown about in passing, but I never read it when I was younger and consuming classics. I got a copy for under a dollar at this great used book store one of my friends told me about in the Bay Area; it’s a very worn out paperback, with the cover creased sharply, diagonally. It was probably a school copy; there were sticky notes inside, and some passages are highlighted and annotated—the vilest of all crimes—but that’s all rather fitting. I like it a lot; I love the portrayal of NYC, as someone who has only visited the city and maintains a level of childlike curiosity and fascination for the Big Apple.

Holden is quite the interesting character, with his views clearly being an outlet for Salinger’s own points. There are some wonderful quotes from Holden or DB, like when DB talks about his time in the army, saying that “if he’d had to shoot anybody, he wouldn’t’ve known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.” It’s pretty easy to read Catcher as an anti-war novel. Holden’s general disparagement of the fake nature of most everyone he encounters excepting innocent children seems to me an indictment of modern (at the time) man and society; of the futileness of war and “the rat race”. When reading the novel I couldn’t help but think of Catch-22 and The Great Gatsby, and how all three novels felt similar; critiques of a major tenet or idealized romance of the American Dream and life in America on a whole—novels that patriotic ideologues would abhor, if they read a little between the lines from time to time. All three are brilliant novels in their own right, each deconstructing a different facet of the oft-espoused-rarely-actualized American Dream.