It’s not the greatest coming-of-age book, that I can agree with. My only question is do coming-of-age books need to be great? If you ask me then they are the transitory phase between coloring books and actual greatness.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, I got slightly depressed reading it. Only slightly because it seemed like the book kind of just exploded by the end. Good start, funny, slightly witty like the protagonist and I’m fine with how it doesn’t aim to be something more or you know phony. I think as you sort of go through all these pages the book gets drunker[1] and shows you an ugly side of the cynicism presented. To me, it was like being shown what an all-time low in life looks like when a 17-year-old could conjure up a life with his mute wife and a job at a petrol pump. The thing is the book has to have got you to agree with how life is right now is pretty shit too, like Catholics stick together(birds of a feather flock together) or talking about the mileage in cars(showing-off) and buying and selling cars(that desire to always keep hustling). But a resolution to that sort of life isn’t running away from education, working at a petrol pump or being completely done with all forms of “stupid useless conversations”.
I like how the resolution is presented by a little boy singing, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye” and the antagonist of the story Mr. Antolini.
“Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it’ll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”
For this review, I don’t have a concrete review on the plot of the book or the characters in it, partly because they weren’t great but also because the book wasn’t supposed to dwell on these characters or plotlines to create the ambiance of a world reigned by angst. Holden hates everything and so should you.
Addressing criticism
A relevant 1 star Google review by Ethan Carson:
There’s something very specific to the book. The author tries to place you in the mind of the protagonist, experience the world with whatever experience he has. And to really accentuate this he introduces you to the lingo of this character. Each word of this “lingo” takes a different meaning as it is presented in each anecdote to be used in the present. It’s sort of as if the story behind the lingo isn’t as important as the word giving meaning to itself through it. In fact, this word is so prominent throughout the anecdote that at only one page of the book you’ll see it repeated several times to just disappear by the next.
The very first example of this is perhaps Mr. Spencer getting a big bang out of buying a Navajo blanket. Here the word becomes “big bang” explained by the anecdote of him buying the blanket and other stuff old people might get a big bang out of. And then he can use it in the present.
I don’t know his name, but he always plays the part of a guy in a war movie that gets yellow before it’s time to go over the top. He was with some gorgeous blonde, and the two of them were trying to be very blasé and all, like as if he didn’t even know people were looking at him. Modest as hell. I got a big bang out of it.
It doesn’t just happen with one word, there are many scattered around the book: Catholics, corny, bore, depressed, bourgeois, digression, and kill. My favorites are digression and kill.
That killed me.
Kill is always presented to us in a negative connotation. In a way, “kill” in this book is the modern-day cringe.
He said the play itself was no masterpiece, but that the Lunts, of course, were absolute angels. Angels. For Chrissake. Angels. That killed me. Then he and old Sally started talking about a lot of people they both knew. It was the phoniest conversation you ever heard in your life. They both kept thinking of places as fast as they could, then they’d think of somebody that lived there and mention their name. I was all set to puke when it was time to go sit down again.
I don’t think this word of his lingo is given a story before its usage. And that is exactly what interests me. When the word is given a story it is a completely different take on the word.
Old Phoebe’s clothes were on this chair right next to the bed. She’s very neat, for a child. I mean she doesn’t just throw her stuff around, like some kids. She’s no slob. She had the jacket to this tan suit my mother bought her in Canada hung up on the back of the chair. Then her blouse and stuff were on the seat. Her shoes and socks were on the floor, right underneath the chair, right next to each other. I never saw the shoes before. They were new. They were these dark brown loafers, sort of like this pair I have, and they went swell with that suit my mother bought her in Canada. My mother dresses her nice. She really does. My mother has terrific taste in some things. She’s no good at buying ice skates or anything like that, but clothes, she’s perfect. I mean Phoebe always has some dress on that can kill you. You take most little kids, even if their parents are wealthy and all, they usually have some terrible dress on. I wish you could see old Phoebe in that suit my mother bought her in Canada. I’m not kidding.
All of the kills that follow this one are much softer.
PHOEBE WEATHERFIELD CAULFIELD
4B-1
That killed me. Her middle name is Josephine, for God’s sake, not Weatherfield.
Kid’s notebooks kill me.
But it returns to it’s usual meaning when Phoebe uses it in:
“Daddy’ll kill you!”
Digression!
Yes, the story digresses from the actual plot but Salinger attempts to somewhat salvage himself from that kind of criticism. I think it’s about the second last chapter Holden talking about his English teacher Mr. Vinson and the oral examination he failed.
The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all.
And I quite agree with him, a book being called, “The Catcher in the Rye” and that sort of is titled for everything it’s not. This is the one time the book is giving meaning to word, not in the protagonist’s lingo but someone else’s and takes the lingo to then explain the concept of the book. And it is quite riveting.
“Holden. . . One short, faintly stuffy, pedagogical question. Don’t you think there’s a time and place for everything? Don’t you think if someone starts out to tell you about his father’s farm, he should stick to his guns, then get around to telling you about his uncle’s brace? Or, if his uncle’s brace is such a provocative subject, shouldn’t he have selected it in the first place as his subject–not the farm?”
“Yes–I don’t know. I guess he should. I mean I guess he should’ve picked his uncle as a subject, instead of the farm, if that interested him most. But what I mean is, lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most. I mean you can’t help it sometimes. What I think is, you’re supposed to leave somebody alone if he’s at least being interesting and he’s getting all excited about something. I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It’s nice. You just didn’t know this teacher, Mr. Vinson. He could drive you crazy sometimes, him and the goddam class. I mean he’d keep telling you to unify and simplify all the time. Some things you just can’t do that to. I mean you can’t hardly ever simplify and unify something just because somebody wants you to. You didn’t know this guy, Mr. Vinson. I mean he was very intelligent and all, but you could tell he didn’t have too much brains.”
I know it’s not much of an explanation but it shall suffice for why the book meanders. I really do wish Ethan Carson could read this.
Caulfield
The other part I like about it is resonating with Caulfield:
- Hating things and liking even fewer. The kind of hate he presents you with is different, you might hate something but still miss the absence of it. It’s the kind of hate that I’ve known all my life: to sit at tables and really be vocal about the certain oddities you find in people sitting in front of you that just tears you up. It’s not like you’d wish for them to disappear(for they fuel that train of thought) but it’s something about that specific kind of hate that just never wants to die out. I sincerely think, the day that this kind of hate dies out in me I’ll be dead or depressed.
I think I even miss that goddam Maurice
- There was never a chance where I thought he was a shitty character. Most people would call him whiny, immature and all that crap but all of this felt more real of him to be (at least for his age). The way he cherishes the innocence of kids to the phoniness of adults, and becoming the catcher in the rye to save that innocence from that endless fall to adulthood.
“All right. Listen to me a minute now . . . I may not word this as memorably as I’d like to, but I’ll write you a letter about it in a day or two. Then you can get it all straight. But listen now, anyway.” He started concentrating again. Then he said, “This fall I think you’re riding for–it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started. You follow me?”
- I love the duck question he keeps asking, it reminded of an episode in The Sopranos.
I like this character summary from the New Yorker:
The Controversy
“Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,” he said. “That’s a deer shooting hat.” . . . “Like hell it is.” I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. “This is a people shooting hat,” I said. “I shoot people in this hat.”
Holden’s comment declaring that it’s “a people shooting hat” reveals feelings of hostility toward a society that, in his eyes, continuously reminds him that he doesn’t quite fit in. While Holden’s tendency to make such off-color remarks reveals his on-going desire to stand out as an individual, such comments might also serve a second purpose: They allow Holden to isolate himself from others, which provides protection from the uncomfortable feeling of always feeling like an outsider.
About three shootings are on the account of this book. The most famous of which is the shooting of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman.
I recommend watching it because the Salinger documentary seemed “phony” and this on the other hand really shows you the consequences of the book. Also I’d love to know what you think about my interpretation of the book.
[1] The Catcher in the Rye struggles with the dark thought that maybe everything is fake and meaningless. Most authors would consider such a psychological premise like that for a short story, but Salinger stretches it out over 200 pages, diving deeper and deeper into Holden’s spiritual downward spiral
The Vision of the Innocent By S. N. Behrman, The New Yorker
In a Small Town, a Battle Over a Book By Seth Mydans, Special To the New York Times
The Catcher in the Rye in Popular Culture
Tony Soprano, Holden Caufield, and Jay Gatsby
References in the Book
- The 39 Steps by Hitchcock but also the book
- Out of Africa by Karen Blixen
- The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
- The Bible
- Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
- Julius Caeser by by Shakespeare
- Lord Randal My Son
- Comin thro’ the Rye by Robert Burns
- The Baker’s Wife by Marcel Pagnol
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Works by Emily Dickinson, Grendal, and Beowulf
Vocabulary to take away
inane, sacrilegious, unscrupulous, ostracizing, pedagogical
(yeah I know there isn’t much, but whatever)
Overall rating
2.7/5 (if you’re into that stuff)