"The Catcher in the Rye" is an alright book. That J.D. Salinger's classic didn't speak to me the way it did to so many others problaby had to do with the fact that I read it in a public high school. I couldn't identify with Holden Caulfield, a prep-school castaway who despises his parents and sees a phony in everyone he meets. Rich kids can afford to hate their parents. In the public schools, where "The Catcher in the Rye" is primarily taught, Holden Caulfield is as real as James's Giant Peach.

The denizens of prep schools grow up to become literary critics and architects of curricula, which helps explain the staying power of "The Catcher in the Rye." It didn't speak to me, but clearly it spoke to someone. The book has sold more than 60,000,000 copies.

"The Catcher in the Rye" is probably better read as a cultural artifact than a novel. It prefaced important postwar trends. In its teen angst and alienation, "The Catcher in the Rye" set the template for the '50s youth rebellion of "Blackboard Jungle" and "Rebel Without a Cause" and the '60s "turn on, tune in, drop out" ethos.

It is that ethos that its author ultimately bought into. We talk about J.D. Salinger primarily because J.D. Salinger did not want us to talk about him. Just as part of his fame stemmed from the fact that he ran from fame, his refusal to publish anything for the last 45 years of his life amplified interest in what stories or novels might lay hidden in his safe. Death is a great career move for rock stars. Disappearance works for writers.

Salinger was a man against his times. We live in an age when people release naked videotapes of themselves to get famous, when celebrity hounds crash White House dinner parties and stage elaborate child-death hoaxes for the want of a reality television show, and when exhibitionists detail the most mundane matters of their life in internet "tweets." Salinger rejected all that, and as a result readers are ironically as interested in his biography as they are in his books.

Eric Hoffer once told Eric Sevareid, "Fame means to be known by people who don't know you." Meeting strangers who believe themselves to be your friend can be a pretty jarring experience. One senses that J.D. Salinger saw things that way. That one of his fans, toting a gun and a copy of his most famous book, shot down John Lennon confirms Salinger's aversion to celebrity.

A healthy reaction to the glare of the public spotlight is to exit stage right. What's truly anti-social is the rush toward gossip columnists and paparazzi. That the former is rare and the latter common confuses us into mistaking the anti-social for the social and the social for the anti-social. There is also something typically parochial about the response of cosmopolitans to Salinger migrating from East 57th Street, Manhattan to Cornish, New Hampshire. What kind of a madman trades in cockroaches, congestion, and crime for covered bridges and country living?

Shunning fame and shunning people are not the same thing. According to the New York Times, Salinger participated in town meetings, shopped at the local supermarket, occasionally attended parties, frequented the library, and regularly shelled out $12 to eat at the Congregationalist Church's roast beef dinners. In other words, though Salinger may have been an eccentric on numerous levels, he interacted with his neighbors the way most Americans do and shied away from interacting with strangers the way most prestigious authors are compelled to do. That such a life struck so many scholars and scribes as alien and unusual says more about them than it does about the author of "The Catcher in the Rye." Howard Hughes with a typewriter J.D. Salinger clearly wasn't.

What's odd is that i haven't even heard of the book until the author died, and everybody made a huge deal of it (ahem... http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/showlink.aspx?bookmarkid=DHCEI6EJG9W7&preview=article&linkid=360fde99-20ba-4803-a481-25c16a7a4c64&pdaffid=ZVFwBG5jk4Kvl9OaBJc5%2bg%3d%3d) and now I have this moral obligation to go and read it.

Thanks for the heads up though: I'll keep it in mind.

Sincerely,
MediaMentions

I'm so glad that your views of the book are similar to my own. I just don't see what's so great about this book.

Maybe it is a baby boomer thing, but it sure spoke to me, the product of blue collar parents and schooled in down-at-the-heels public school. It functioned as a corrective to the Brady Bunch view of children as simple beings with simple problems. It may also have appealed to me because I was a loner in my adolescence, and Caulfield seemed a somewhat kindred spirit. Whatever, I found it fascinating at the time.

"Catcher" did not speak to me. I had to read the book and write a paper on it in high school, as did probably everybody else. I went to Catholic high school in the 70's, and had to work after school to pay my tuition. I had a very middle-class upbringing and I respected my parents. I felt that I had nothing in common with Holden. My paper reflected those sentiments. I was awarded a C- on the paper. I guess I didn't try hard enough to empathize with Holden.

Maybe Mr. Salinger stayed out of the public eye because he just felt like he had nothing more to say.

I read it in 8th grade and WAS moved by the book. I think it was the notion that it was written in the vernacular with resonated with issues that we felt at that age.

Normally we associate "literature" with a different types of reading experience -- more elevated, but harder to relate to; for that book to be sanctioned by school meant that literature was deeper and richer than we knew.

The book also captures cyncism well, and the great desire of the young to reject that "phoniness" we know will swallow us whole one day.