Catcher Me If You Can

I hadn't read any Salinger since my college days, and I was excited to get to read him again, as well as a little scared.  My sister had recently attempted to read Catcher in the Rye and had told me that she "just couldn't do it."  I was afraid that Holden wouldn't be the person I remembered, our old friendship strained as one of us moved on in life while the other stayed in his same old circles.

Instead, our reunion was a happy one, and we got on like we had never been apart.  Salinger has an incredible talent for taking hold of a moment and having the details feel simultaneously offhand and poignant, both casual and powerful. 

One of the interesting things I find again and again on this journey through these 100+ novels is how varied the novels are aesthetically, and how much work it is to transition from one work to another.  Each novel is like moving into a foreign country, and the unfamiliar language and customs are jarring at first.  The culture is of course not going to change for your convenience, so you must to the changing if you don't want to be miserable during your stay.  If you're lucky, when it comes time to collect your things and catch the next train, you will be able to feel like you understood and appreicated where you have been.

Sometimes the people in the foreign land are cold and formal and unfriendly, and you never feel like you fit in.   But occasionally, you feel at home from the moment you pull into the station.  The people are warm, the landscape familiar and exotic at the same time.  You understand the language and fall into step with the natives without any effort.  That was my experience coming back to Catcher in the Rye.

Catcher in the Rye is more of a character study than a novel.  Holden Caulfield is the novel.  Moreover, he does not have a character arc; he does not progress or grow through the course of the novel.  He does not learn something that makes him see the world differently.  If you don't like Holden, you are not going to like the novel.  If you are taken in by his charm and depth, however, then you are in for a wonderful experience.

I found Holden to be touching and captivating.  When I read the book in my early 20s, I was struck by the toughness of Holden, his outward signs of worldliness.  He roams the streets of New York like an old pro, smoking, drinking, going to bars, being visited by prostitutes, and walking through Central Park in the deep dark of night.  He seemed to be jaded and too fast grown, looking for the innocence he no longer possessed, to protect the innocence symbolized for him by his sister Phoebe and by the children playing in the rye at the cliff's edge.  His obsession with phonies was a rejection of the false world of adults that he had been thrust into, diametrically opposed to the honest innocence and natural interaction of kids.

On this reading I had the perspective of being older, of having a son of my own, and I felt a tenderness toward Holden that made me love him all the more.  For all his posturing, he is precisely where most 16-year-olds are, in that awkward place between childhood and adulthood.  He himself has the very innocence he seeks to protect.  For example, his wondering about where the ducks in Central Park go when the pond freezes over kills me, as Holden would say.  He has such a genuine love for all the people in his stories, even as he tells you how much he can't stand them.  As much as he critiques the other boys in the various schools he attends, he has something nice to say about everyone.  He even concludes the novel with that sense of loss over all the people he encountered, even the kids he didn't like.  Even his language, which attempts to sound tough, simultaneously  sounds childish and sweet.  Salinger concluded Holden's narrative with him sitting on a bench watching Phoebe ride the merry-go-round, bawling because she "looked so damn nice."  I can't think of a more perfect ending, because I felt just like Holden, only it was he who was on the merry-go-round, circling New York City and the people of the story, reaching for the gold ring, as I sat on the bench worrying about him falling, but not interfering.  As I said earlier, Holden doesn't have a character arc, so it is literally like a merry-go-round that takes us nowhere over the 48 hours that the novel covers,  And like Phoebe, who chooses the same mount to ride after circling the ride, Holden selects the same course of action again and again.

Salinger is a master of his craft, and I find his style to be very powerful.  First-person narratives are always a challenge because you need to be in character and still say something meaningful.  The usual solution to this problem is to have the narrator have a few verbal tics to throw in occasionally and then tell the story you want.  Given how particular Holden's talk is, it should by all rights become overpowering and tiring, perhaps satisfying the needs of a short story, but never sustaining the needs of a novel.  But Salinger makes it work again and again.  And more importantly, he mines the language of youth for its poetry.  Holden has a detail that sums up everyone he encounters.  Jane, for example, never uses her kings in checkers; she just keeps them on the back row.  When Holden's roommate takes Jane out on a date, Holden, being sixteen, has a hell of a time processing his emotions about the possibility of Stradlater making time with Jane.  The inevitable result of Holden's immaturity and powerful emotions is a fight, which ends with Stradlater kneeling on Holden's chest, pinning his wrists to the ground:  "He kept holding onto my wrists and I kept calling hims a sonuvabitch and all, for around ten hours.  I can hardly even remember what all I said to him.  I told him he thought he could give the time to anybody he felt like.  I told him he didn't even care if a girl kept all her kings in the back row or not, and the reason he didn't care was because he was a goddam stupid moron."  These phrases echo like refrains in a song, gaining power and force with each repetition.  Holden just about breaks my heart.

I have gone on long enough, so I will spare you my thoughts about Catcher in the Rye as a first criticism of the American Dream and feeling of optimism that grew throughout the 50s as the American economy grew stronger and stronger (that bit about needing your luggage to not be better than your roommate's is brilliant!).  We won't talk about his red hunting hat or his crying when Phoebe gave him her Christmas money, or Phoebe's playing Benedict Arnold in the school play.  Feel free to talk about those things yourself, or anything else that struck you about the novel.