I read The Catcher in the Rye decades ago, when I was a teacher-training student at Bishop Otter College, Chichester. In their usual woolly way, staff were keen on getting us to read fiction and memoir which took us inside juvenile minds. I didn’t warm to it much although I’ve met many people over the years who praise it to the hilt. Then, a few months ago, it appeared on the yes-please-for-Christmas list sent me by my 14-year old granddaughter. Naturally I bought it for her, along with several other titles on her rather encouraging list. And I made a mental note to myself, half a century after my first visit, to reread and reappraise it,
Famously it’s a first person – almost stream of consciousness in places – account of Holden Caulfield’s troubles at school (thrown out of several), sexual yearnings, sense of alienation and suicidal thoughts all worsened by a great deal of heavy drinking and smoking. He is one of those characters who has acquired a persona outside the covers of the novel so that people who’ve never read The Catcher in the Rye usually know roughly who he is. Mr Darcy, Miss Havisham and Lady Chatterley have similar status.
Holden is being expelled from his latest boarding school but his parents haven’t yet been informed. So he bunks off to New York City and tries to amuse himself, planning to turn up at home on the day term ends. Thus, in a narrative which covers just two or three days we get lots of flashbacks. He is clearly haunted by his dead brother, Allie, and fond of his little sister Phoebe, along with an older brother who’s developing a career as a writer in Hollywood. We also hear about boys he’s known, and loathed, in various schools and a couple of girls he’s been pals with for a long time. He has, of course, almost no sexual experience and his attempt to spend a night with a prostitute is a miserable failure. His self-confidence is pretty fragile.
JD (Jerome David) Salinger was 33 in 1952 when his most famous book was published. The concept of teenager hadn’t really arrived. Young people were crudely perceived to jump from late childhood to young adulthood without any sort of acknowledged developmental period. And there was certainly no casual talk about “hormones” as an explanation for anything anyone does, says or feels between the ages of say 12 and 18. So The Catcher in the Rye broke new ground. Holden is confused, contradicts himself, does wildly silly things and uses lazy catch phrases: “I really do”, “it kills me” and “phoney”, for example. These irritate the reader as much as they probably do the adults who have to deal with him, although parents and teachers are largely absent in the narrative because he’s avoiding them. The one teacher he is fond of, when contacted, offers Holden a bed for the night but that goes wrong too. He’s moody, difficult, capricious, rebellious, unhappy and brittle but buoyed up by shallow bravado. It’s a pretty accurate account of the sort of state of mind many teenagers find themselves in when life seems to have gone dangerously pear-shaped.
Holden also “swears” continually. His favourite adjective is “goddamned”, a profanity which many found offensive in 1952. The hundreds of authors I’ve read since who write teenage first person narratives would generally use rather stronger language but in The Catcher in the Rye the word “fuck” occurs only a few times when Holden is horrified by its use in graffiti at his sister’s school so it becomes a marker for where his boundaries lie and an acknowledgement that he has some. His self-conscious attempts to be “grown up” – getting served alcohol in bars when he’s still a minor, or staying n hotels – are well observed and I suspect many adult readers identify with that.
It’s hard to say whether Salinger, who died in 2010 aged 91, meant The Catcher in the Rye to help adults understand young people or to give teenagers something they could really recognise – or both. And surely there must be autobiographical elements in a novel as raw as this. I also wonder, 74 years after its publication. how much this novel will mean to a modern young reader like my granddaughter. I’m waiting to hear her response. I suspect that most young 2026 readers will feel more at home with some of Jacqueline Wilsons’s more perspicacious novels (such as The Illustrated Mum) or with Sarah Crossan’s perceptive verse novels. But I reserve judgement.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley
