Catcher in the Rye

An outsider looking in, estranged from everyone. Holden describes having a panic attack and barely being able to walk down the street. It was a favorite novel for a long time but I don't need to revisit it.

I can’t believe this is still being pressed upon teenagers.

Every disaffected teen thinks they are Holden Caulfield. They’re able to project all of their own insecurities and neuroses onto him. That’s why it remains a popular book to teach to high schoolers. I think it’s finally reaching the point where it’s so obviously a product of its time that it’s less relatable, much like other books like The Outsiders or A Separate Peace, but it will continue to be taught for a while.

I'd like to think kids would still relate to some of it. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't strike them as being as transgressive as the boomers did though.

“I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes....If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.”

“I am always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

“I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.”

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.

Maybe you can just point out to your students that it was a product of its time. That it was appreciated by a couple of generations for ___X___ reasons.

I don't think you can make it enjoyable in and of itself, though.

So help me, it made me want to assassinate the president!!!

It did a lot of normalize anal sex for a generation of teenagers.

group presentations by chapter.

takes a week and no one has to read the whole thing, even you.

find some current item that relates.

you're welcome.

Salinger wrote a fine book about a teenage. He didn't write it FOR teenagers.

OP Can you explain why you "have to" teach it? Especially since you judge it to be "tiresome...shit".

R9 here *about a teenager*

I read it a few years ago and didn't mind it. Probably one of those books that clicks with some people and not others. I didn't love it while reading it but afterwards the story and character stayed with me more than a lot of other books. It doesn't help if you go into it thinking it's this famous classic because that sets an expectation.

I think readers who say they didnt like, or outright hate CITR were REQUIRED (forced) to read it at too young an age (high school). I urge you OP to try reading it again . You may find you like it because much of the subtext, (such as Holden being a victim of sexual molestation,) is clearer to an adult.

You mean your school district hasn't banned it yet? Give them time.

This probably comes across as old-timey dreck to kids these days. Good luck!

Maybe someone should write a novel for this generation.

Using emojis.

I read it 40 years ago but must have missed the anal sex part. Can someone please explain?

Haha, OP. I thought I was the only teenager who thought this book was over-rated shit. Classic, my ass.

It's a mashup of a coming of age story and watered down Nietzsche starring an unlikable unreliable highly impulsive (also highly neurotic) and eccentric (mentally unstable teenager (most likely asperger's or ADHD or a combination of the two) hypocritically ranting about those he perceives as "phonies."

It's a decent book but like Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby it suffers from legions of fans liking or identifying with it for all the wrong reasons. Mainly on a superficial level.

I thought the kid would be described as having anxiety due to trauma, his younger brother died and he did not process that loss .

I did enjoy The Great Gatsby, but never identified with the titular character or the narrator. I just liked it for the story of a different time and place that I'd never otherwise know.

R16, there is no sex at all, anal or otherwise.

I read it for the first time about 6 months ago. I thought Holden was a self-absorbed shallow, rich kid bore. I don't understand why it has been an iconic novel.

It did make me long for the days before cell phones, computers and ever-present surveillance when people actually lived in raw reality.

The Great Gatsby was a better book. You don't have to identify with the characters.

I had to read both Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby, and I don't remember either of them. But Orwell's 1984? [bold]That[/bold] I remember.

OP, if your students haven't read that by the time they get to you, make sure they do.

To love The Catcher in The Rye, I think you have to read it between the ages of 14 to 16, at a time when you are developing the instinctive feeling that a lot of what you are told to to think about the world is meaningless bullshit.

If you read it in your thirties or forties, that central truth of the book is so self-evident that Holden sounds like a dimwit bore rather than a struggling but strangely insightful youngster.

Any chance you can swap it out for a REAL classic, like "Valley of the Dolls"?

Holden is very funny, has funny observations and yes, he's very judgmental but aren't we all. I was interested to learn Oona O'Neil was the inspiration for a character.

It was required reading in 7th grade when I was a kid, I loved it but I can't explain why. It stays with me though, things remind me of the book - Rockefeller Center, The Lunts, seeing "fuck you" written everywhere, Vicks Nose Drops.

A friend and I plotted for years how to get over Salinger's wall (i lived in Vermont then) and the last time I had cause to be in Windsor I took extra time hanging around because i was sure he'd wander by in his quest for the post office but he didn't.

[quote] To love The Catcher in The Rye, I think you have to read it between the ages of 14 to 16, at a time when you are developing the instinctive feeling that a lot of what you are told to to think about the world is meaningless bullshit.

That's when I read it, R24, and thought it was all a pompous bore. I think it has more to do with the type of person reading it.

R21 Thank you - I would hate to think I missed that.

It's about a bossy bottom in a Jewish deli.

I love it. I like John Green's take.

Everyone from James Dean to Jerry Lewis wanted to make this movie. Salinger forbade it his entire life. And so far, his estate is adhering to his wishes.

Woody basically made a version of it with Timmy. And Igby Goes Down with Kieren Culkin was also a version of it.

On whom did Igby go down?

"Daria" was also a version of the novel.

OP, pretending to be stupid for us is so much easier for you because you ARE that stupid, right?

Yes.

Of course.

R17 and R21 are absolutely fucking correct!!

Holden is a BORE.

It probably belonged to a particular place and time. It was unlike anything before it. Now, it just seems like a story about an unhappy, rich prepster.

Very little mid-century fiction seems to be surviving and no talked about Bellow, Updike and most of the others once they died. I think Roth is the one author whose work will continue to be read and it will be his late stuff.

[quote] I read it 40 years ago but must have missed the anal sex part. Can someone please explain?

There's no anal sex in it. You're confusing it with "Anne of Green Gables."

I preferred both "Separate Peace" (and it's vague homo subtext) and "Lord of the Flies" compared to "Catcher in the Rye" when it comes juvenile male angst.

I also disagree with R37's take. The 1950s were replete with teenagers calling out bourgeois bullshit. Hell, just look at James Dean.

r15, the last part of your post literally made me LOL!

Thank you for cheering up my Monday morning.

What r24 said. If it has to be read, do it when you’re an angsty teenager. Our school read Separate Peace instead. When I read Catcher as an adult, I thought it was tedious.

If you really want to torment your class, have them read Death Be Not Proud.

It was banned in my high school (early 70s Boston suburb) but was read by the cooler smart kids. Funny to see it go onto required reading lists in high schools and then down to junior highs. Any teacher teaching it today is a burnout who hasn’t had an original thought in decades.

Do teachers choose the reading curriculum? I figured that was mandated by the school board and/or principal. Maybe they're given an approved list from which to pick?

The reading age of high school kids has declined dramatically over the last couple of generations. They did a survey of favourite books of Australian kids in the most senior three years of secondary school recently, and all of them were rated by the authorities as the level that the average Grade 5-7 reader would cope with. A lot of Harry Potter, etc. The only one on the list that a boomer would recognise as "literary" was To Kill a Mockingbird, and that was also the only one that was not broadly contemporary. As a boomer, we were reading Dickens and Patrick White in senior secondary, inside and outside school. So no wonder kids can't get their heads round Catcher. I don't think it's a great book, and it has dated, but it has a level of irony that's way beyond that level of reading.

You also have to remember that senior school and college students of the same era were into Camus (The Outsider) and Sartre, so the romance of alienation from society was big with them. Of course, alienation was such a big trend that you belonged better if you were into it: which is the same level of irony Salinger is going for.

I guess the reading levels are another wonderful impact of social media.

Holden Caufield grew up to be Patrick Bateman

R42 interesting. I was in a suburb of Boston as well, required reading, not banned. So I'm guessing you're not talking about Newton.

The OO sounds like someone who should not be teaching.

OP , not OO

Gotta love the troll.

Especially while stuffing dog shit into her fresh wounds.

The abducted Miranda Grey character in Jown Fowles's 1970s thriller "The Collector" is both sympathetic and gently mocked by the author for her youthful pretentiousness. When the formally uneducated protagonist, Frederick (whom she has nicknamed "Caliban") tellls her he read the novel but "doesn't see much point in it," she replies: "You do realize it's one of the most brilliant studies of adolescence ever written?" You sense the author is having a bit of fun with the character.

R13 where is the sexual molestation of Holden. I read that book twice in the 9th grade and all I remember are the swans and his sister, and that he guy he hates but is secretly attracted to. When does Diddy appear?

Just google teaching guides for Catcher in the Rye.

You'll get a plethora of hits, such as:

[quote]On whom did Igby go down?

Oh dear. Did you mean to write, “Down on whom did Igby go?”

I loved it when I was a junior in high school. I tried to revisit it when I was maybe 30 and couldn't get through it.

The Bell Jar is far superior.

R9 Has it right. Those of college age and young adults are more likely to appreciate it than middle and high school students do. I read it at age 16 and it really hit for me, but I was sort of the exception in my class. I still appreciate it it 4 decades later, but it's of course no longer my favorite book.

I watched Igby Goes Down a few months ago and I can definitely see the connection, r32. Very insightful.

R55 Yes it is. Far more realistic and relatable.

Salinger wrote the book when he was in the war . I only learned that as an adult. It’s one of my favorite books. Salinger based many of the characters on people in his life.

I loved his relationship with his sister Phoebe . I am sentimental. I remember my high school teacher asking us what the author meant by quoting Holden asking where do the birds go when it rains.

Years later I discovered that the entire narrative was written by Holden when he was in a psych hospital.

Themes in adolescent inspired literature are universal. Everything does not have to be in lockstep with all the drivel we are so accustomed to. I especially like one of the last lines : whatever you do, don’t go telling everybody everything about you; you’ll just end up missing everyone like crazy .

Idea : ask your students to write a short narrative re: what would Holden have to say today about his life ….

Reagan supporters hate the novel

It's meh. It's certainly no "The Stranger"

R53, no.

There are far more boring and irrelevant books that we were required to read in HS.

It was a slog. The only book that we were required to read that I liked was To Kill a Mockingbird.

Seeing the word 'crap' on the first page was enough to make it an angst-y favorite to Boomer high schoolers and wannabe cool English teachers.

No real teacher would dismiss a writer with the gifts of Salinger as a writer of "tiresome shit". OP is full of tiresome shit herself.

I think I had to read it but have no memory of that book. Underwhelmed.

I don't know you guys. I think it's a fantastic book, and one that made me feel less alone as a closeted gay teen. I sorta fell in love with Holden at the time.

I was once reading it and Holden was describing being on a train from Princeton to New York, and he describes pulling into Newark station. Thing is, I swear on my life, I looked out the windows and my train was pulling through Newark station at the very same time!

Spooky, no?

R66 I agree Salinger is great but his short stories about the Glass family are much better examples of his skill.

Let's not mention his love of young girls.

I read this in 11th grade, on my own. We weren't "taught" it; what's to teach? It's a funny and poignant tale of adolescent angst about the "goddam" world of "phonies." Kids don't need to be "taught" in a formal class by adults on how to understand this novel.

Two assassins carried Catcher with them at the time...John Hinckley (Reagan), Arthur Bremer (George Wallace). Neither attempt was successful but the coincidence was wierd.

OP is so world weary. I would have hated to have had an English teacher like him.

Buy a study guide on the novel, OP.

My favorite novel. I wish I could write like that.

In 7th grade I was assigned the task of writing a book report on Catcher in the Rye. Everyone (15 or 20 of us) had a different book to write about, and the reason was to see how well each of us transcribed the basis and meaning of their particular book. I was thrilled that I got a short book but I was bored by it after about 50 pages. I decided rather than finish it I'd read Cliff notes and some additional interpretations of my book. Yea me. I received the best grade in the class, A+, and a glowing testimony from my teacher about what an exceptional job I did evaluating and explaining my book. After cheating my way through this I actually read the damn book and didn't like or really understand it. The part about Holden standing in the field at the end... WTH.

R72 also Mark David Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon.

They’re still making kids read this? It’s very of its time and not in a good way like the classics.

For me, as a teen in the early 90s, pre-internet, etc, it was the first time I realized I wasn't the only one with a sardonic monologue laughing at the stupidity of everything looping in my head at all times. It was quite shocking to me at the time. It's one fucking funny book. They couldn't teach it in our school bc of all the goddam 'goddams.' I'm glad I read it for fun, as I hate every book I was forced to read. I hope to be dead before they finally find a loophole to make it into a movie.

R76 Forgot about him...thanks. Such an odd connection.

Colden was a repressed homosexual teen. And they still exist. I know one now. All that "flit" talk. The book is still relevant. Every kid should still read it.

Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, is a coming-of-age novel that has left an indelible mark on American literature. The story is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a disenchanted teenager who has been expelled from numerous preparatory schools. As Holden recounts his experiences over a few days in New York City, readers gain insight into his struggles with identity, societal expectations, and the loss of innocence.l.

Fun fact: "Pencey Prep" is based on the real Valley Forge Military Academy, attended for a time by Salinger.

R75, What? You wrote a report on "The Catcher in the Rye" and yet were (are?) baffled by a final scene of the main character's STANDING IN A FIELD? OF RYE, MAYBE? AS A CATCHER, MAYBE?

Think about it.

R71 here. Maybe some aspects of this book do need to be elucidated by an adult.

I still remember buying this book as a teenager and being so underwhelmed when I actually read it. South Park summed it up well.

I felt the same way after reading " The Scarlet Letter" in 9th grade. I asked the teacher," Who decided that this was a classic?"

R8 this

R75 7th grade is too young to understand and appreciate the book. You have to be at least 15-16 to get really get it.

R84, I hope your teacher replied, "Brilliant minds before us."

To the unready, genius will always be as pearls before swine. No offense to the swine, but to its prior education.

I understood The Scarlett Letter, read it in high school& at college.

It was good to be a man, bad to be a woman!

How can you teach a book without having read it?

To R83, South Park is correct.

[quote]I understood The Scarlett Letter

You just didn't learn how to spell it.

^^^ My Bad R91^^^

I read it once in my twenties. I guess I'd grown so inured to "swearing" that I don't remember that being part of it. As far as the story, and its hero, go, I neither loved it nor hated them. I hoped for a bit that Holden might be gay, but that wasn't happening. I had forgotten Catcher until this thread appeared yesterday.

[quote]I understood The Scarlett Letter, read it in high school& at college. It was good to be a man, bad to be a woman!

My hs classmate, when asked what the message of the Scarlet Letter was said," Keep it zipped when you go into the woods."

The Catcher in the Rye takes the loss of innocence as its primary concern. Holden wants to be the “catcher in the rye”—someone who saves children from falling off a cliff, which can be understood as a metaphor for entering adulthood

Noooooo!!!

Salinger was no moi.

Novella [italic]Young Törless[/italic], by Robert Musil, is the way to go for this kind of literature.

Salinger would be outed as a pedo now. My guess is the only reason Joyce Maynard hasn't done so is that she's made a good career for herself without him.

R99 Do you know what the term pedophile means? Maynard was a freshman at Yale when she chose to be with Salinger. (The Washington Post book review called her Memoir "indescribably stupid". Love that.)

Holden has a physical fight with his roommate and leaves school. At one point, ( he's running low on cash) he winds up sleeping on the couch of a favorite former teacher..he falls asleep and wakes up to the guy stroking his hair.

Holden is creeped out and leaves, he mentions this type of thing has happened a few times in his life and it always freaks him out.

He is disgusted by the incident and blown away this respected teacher is just another sex pest.

To be clear, there's no mention of sex, rape or assault. .

Holden had the fight with his roommate in a jealous rage because an ex-girlfriend went on a date with the guy. The roommate is described by Holden as conventionally attractive and aggressive with girls, won't take no for an answer.

It's implied in the novel, the ex-girlfriend received too much unwanted attention from her step-father. There's a symmetry between the two characters fighting off unwelcome advances... from men.

OP you think that you skimmed it at fourteen and you say that it’s a tiresome piece of shit and now you’ve come to the DL for advice on how to teach it to your students.

The American education system is in good hands, OP!

Breakfast at Tiffany’s was my Catcher in the Rye. As a teen I really could identify with the gay guy drawn like a moth to the manic pixie dream girl.

The Bell Jar was my Catcher in the Rye,

R80 he talks about how it's weird when other guys talk to him in the men's room while he's taking a dump.

I'm going to put my hand up as an admirer of The Catcher in the Rye.

Outside of Lolita, I can think of no other classic American novel so misinterpreted.

What Salinger is showing is the effect of familial death on a fragile pubescent male.

Holden is experiencing what we now think of as post-traumatic stress disorder.

He cannot disengage from the death of his sibling. His alienation causes him to view the world of people without that trauma as being inherently "phony". The "unreality" of life in general continuing after the death of an individual is the source of his alienage, but he cannot understand this and the adults in his life have not realized what he is experiencing.

"In their biography of Salinger, David Shields and Shane Salerno argue that: "The Catcher in the Rye can best be understood as a disguised war novel." Salinger witnessed the horrors of World War II, but rather than writing a combat novel, Salinger, according to Shields and Salerno, "took the trauma of war and embedded it within what looked to the naked eye like a coming-of-age novel."

I hope you’re not pushing this book on celiacs in your class OP because rye contains gluten.

A substitute teacher out on Long lsland was dropped from his job for fighting with a student. A few weeks later, he returned to the classroom, shot the student - unsuccessfully, held the class hostage, and then shot himself - successfully. This fact caught my eye. Last sentence, Times - 'A neighbor described the teacher as a nice boy, always reading Catcher in the Rye.'

This nit-wit Chapman, who shot John Lennon, said he did it because he wanted to draw the attention of the world to Catcher in the Rye, and the reading of this book would be his defense.

Young Hinckley, the whiz kid who shot Reagan and his press secretary, said: 'If you want my defense, all you have to do is read Catcher in the Rye.'...

I borrowed a copy from a young friend of mine, because I wanted to see what she had underlined. And I read this book to find out why this touching, beautiful, sensitive story, published in July 1951, had turned into this manifesto of hate. I started reading. It's exactly as I had remembered. Everybody's a phony. Page two - 'My brother's in Hollywood being a prostitute.' Page three - "What a phony slob his father was.' Page nine - 'People never notice anything.' Then, on page 22, my hair stood up. Well. Remember Holden Caulfield, the definitive sensitive youth wearing his red hunter's cap? A deer hunter's cap? 'Like hell it is. I sort of closed one eye like I was taking aim at it.' 'This is a people shooting hat. I shoot people in this hat.'

This book is preparing people for bigger moments in their lives than I had ever dreamed of. Then, on page 89, 'I'd rather push a guy out the window or chop his head off with an axe than sock him in the jaw.' 'I hate fistfights. What scares me most is the other guy's face.' I finished the book. It's touching and comic. The boy wants to do so much and can't do anything. Hates all phoniness and only lies to others. Wants everyone to like him but is only hateful and is completely self involved. In other words, a pretty accurate picture of a male adolescent.

What alarms me about the book - not the book so much as the aura about it - is this. The book is primarily about paralysis. The boy can't function. At the end, before he can run away and start a new life, it starts to rain. He folds. There's nothing wrong in writing about emotional and intellectual paralysis. It may, thanks to Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, be the great modern theme...

The aura around Salinger's book - which, perhaps, should be read by everyone but young men - is this. It mirrors like a fun-house mirror, and amplifies like a distorted speaker one of the great tragedies of our times - the death of the imagination. Because what else is paralysis? The imagination has been so debased that imagination - being imaginative, rather than being the linch pin of our existence, now stands as a synonym for something outside ourselves. Like science fiction. Or some new use for tangerine slices on raw pork chops - 'What an imaginative summer recipe.' And Star Wars - 'so imaginative'. And Star Trek - 'so imaginative'. And Lord of the Rings, all those dwarves - 'so imaginative'.

The imagination has moved out of the realm of being our link, our most personal link, with our inner lives and the world outside that world, this world we share. What is schizophrenia but a horrifying state where what's in here doesn't match what's out there?

Why has imagination become a synonym for style? I believe the imagination is the passport that we create to help take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is merely another phrase for what is most uniquely us. Jung says, 'The greatest sin is to be unconscious.' Our boy Holden says, 'What scares me most is the other guy's face.' 'It wouldn't be so bad if you could both be blindfolded.' Most of the time, the faces that we face are not the other guys', but our own faces. And it is the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself that you put blindfolds on rather than deal

I feel it speaks to the teenage experience, when you start realizing how much of a social mask we wear, how we need to start making concessions that don't feel authentic to us in how we behave and act to survive in a society. It spoke to mine. I could empathize with Holden, then. I read it now and can't connect to it in the same way, but I still think it speaks of that experience beautifully. It's about the shittiness of growing up.

Holden wasn't gay but I bet the guy they threw out the window, that was wearing Holden's turtleneck, was.

R77 you're an idiot. That's it.

I didn’t read it as a teenager, I read The Catcher In The Rye in my mid-30s and found it funny and touching. I found Holden sweet and hapless.

Like the scene where he’s pretending he’s some smooth city guy when buying drinks for women at a nightclub and them dancing with him and not taking his delusions of adulthood seriously at all. Ahhh, poor kid.

And when he on a whim gives a bunch of money to a nun.

I read it when I was maybe in my later 20s. I loved it. Salinger is laugh out loud funny, as well as a great writer. I read all of his other published writing, after it. f you don't like it then you don't like it, I guess.

Back when this was read in high school in the '70s where I lived, you had to have your parents sign a form first. (My class didn't read it, but my friend's did.)

R106 AS I recall, his mother hasn't gotten over the death of the brother (Ally) either.

What’s next on the syllabus, “Trouble After School”?

[quote]I'd like to think kids would still relate to some of it. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't strike them as being as transgressive as the boomers did though.

[quote]“I am always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

This direct quote reminded me instantly of the current DL 'Are you faking through life?' thread. Particularly this incisive recollection:

[quote]It was her little brother who confronted her about her withdrawal. She said, "I'm faking it every minute I'm out there, do I have to fake it with my family too?"

A good case for thinking that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Which makes me believe that TCITR will not go out of print any time soon.

“I used to think she was quite intelligent, in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.”

Holden would have a whale of a time here on DL. No phonies in sight.

I read it when I was in college. It seemed overrated. Just a story about a sullen rich kid.

He's severely depressed, he has a breakdown and ends up institutionalized.

smh...

Men psychologically on the edge of society who have committed brief bursts of extravagant destruction have loved Catcher In The Rye and Holden Caufield.

Holden goes to the carousel in Central Park with Phoebe towards the end of Catcher In The Rye.

Luigi Mangione abandoned his backpack by the Carousel in Central Park!

Coincidence? I think - probably, yes, it is a coincidence.

R80 maybe. Holden is JD Sallinger. One thing we do know is that Holden is very horny, like most 16 year old boys, and doesn't know quite what to do about it. There are definitely semi-homoeroric passages in the book.

Interesting reading comments here that in order to appreciate the book you have to identify with the kid. I think reading it with the understanding he was molested and considering that perhaps that experience was the touchstone for his childish, defensive view of the world was sorta heartbreaking. I wasn’t molested, I was well last my teen years, personally didn’t identify with the kid at all, but thought it was a decent read.

where was he molested? holden was groped by sex pests not molested. it is implied one of his girlfriends was being abused by her stepfather.

I first read it as a high school sophomore as part of a group reading class. I thought it was good not great. After college when I was on vacation at my relatives summer house in Cape Cod and I found a copy in the room I was staying and read it again, this time on my own. It left a considerable bigger impression on me then, either because I could focus better on my own or because I was older and could understand and appreciate it better. I was then able to understand why it was considered a big deal.

I rather think I would have assumed Salinger was “trying too hard” had I read CITR as a teen.

Reading it for the first time in my 30s, I think it’s genius. And I do agree with Salinger’s editor who thought that Holden was crazy. Not a kind term, but he was clearly hugely damaged and traumatised and had difficulty parsing reality.

OP - Swap it for Ed White's A Boys Own Story. That will open their eyes.

Kidding. But you could swap it for Talented Mr. Ripley if that won't get you fired.

Sub in this for something 21st century similar to Cather:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)

I love Catcher. My younger husband not so much when he read it for the first time recently. When I taught it my high school students asked why Holden wasn't on anti-depressants. That was a fun discussion. I passed out maps of Manhattan, and they had to draw and label Holden's movements. The students did enjoy thinking about his freedom to go as he pleased.

Crazy to me means he had a mental disorder, when I think he just had emotional issues, adjustment issues and depression that kept him from being able to adapt and function. But we as readers love that he doesn't want to conform to a world of "phonies." He sees through a lot of things, but that's the "reality" of depression.

I love that the book denigrates Hollywood's output, and partially because of that, Sallinger refused to sell the film rights, despite world renowned filmmakers begging to film from from when the book was released to his death.

Surprised that his estate has not yet relented. I will be surprised if I don't see a CITR movie in my lifetime.

I think he put into his will not to be made into a movie.

Same as Colin Dexter who wrote Inspector Morse, he did not give permission to have future actors as Inspector Morse besides Shaun Evans.

I can imagine a terrible Hulu series if Hollywood written by Grant Heslov did get its hands on it.

Huge odds against planets aligning to make a film worthy of CITR. At very best it would be like the 'Gatsby' attempts, and ruin the book for hapless neophytes. Salinger's insistence was dead right.

I stopped reading it 1/3 through as a teen. Didn’t want Holden’s tiresome mental health challenges dragging my mood down any longer, and I couldn’t locate enough reason to keep reading.

The French variation was 'Bonjour Tristesse', which was weirdly filmed as a movie with British actors David Niven and Deborah Kerr, and American Jean Seberg.

I’d like to hang out and share some beers and pizza with the Maine Cabin Masters. I’m sure they partake in other fun stuff as well.

The only thing Salinger wrote that was filmed, to my knowledge, was his short story, Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut, that became the Sam Goldwyn production, My Foolish Heart (1949), with Susan Hayward and Dana Andrews.

Holden is written as not being able to emotionally move on from being a tweenager. Holden slow dances with Phoebe and kind of feels her, he pinches her butt, she invites him into her bed to sleep there - again. He describes how cute and flirtatious she is. He idealises her as the only purely loveable thing in his life.

Reading his shorts stories - and even CITR - you can see that JDS was into young teens. Bananafish, anyone? Write what you know…

Sorry, can’t, unfortunately! 😱

When I read it in HS, all I kept thinking was "this kid is a 'tool'"

Speaking of this book, I got into this huge online discussion on reddit about the scene where he wakes up and his profesor was patting him on the head, where Holden says something like "Weird stuff like that is always happening to me". It seemed to alot of redditors that that is a clear indicator that Holden has been sexually molested before. I don't know if I am just being a little too naive (which is rare because people usually describe me as the opposite) or it's that the weirdly obsessed with sexual violence/sexual deviance younger generations that see everything through that prism but I just do not see this at all. I interpreted that incident at best as his teacher just being drunk and randomly patting his head as affectionate and at worst a drunken pass, and that that was what Holden aluded to, being randomly hit on, but where people got from OMG HE WAS SEXUALLY ABUSED AS A CHILD, I'll never known.

It’s both, to me. Leaving aside that Gen Z sees “PDF Files” behind the furniture, I believe Salinger wrote that entire scene to be interpreted either way. Antolini was the first adult to truly show attention and care to Holden during that period. A cynic could read that him suggesting Holden take advice from a caring older man as grooming, or as kindness. Holden being un the throes of a nervous breakdown wasn’t in a position to accept in any case. And I think the same applies to Holden’s reaction.

[quote] "I have to go, anyway," I said—boy, was I nervous! I started putting on my damn pants in the dark. I could hardly get them on I was so damn nervous. I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they're always being perverty when I'm around.

He could be saying that other men have copped a feel; or he could mourning that the pre-sexual childhood innocence he idealises is totally absent at school because he reads sexual danger in everything.

FWIW, when I was a similarly inexperienced kid in my mid-teens, when an barely known adult of either sex would rub my back or ruffle my hair, if it felt anything like a caress, I would jump out of my skin and want to run a mile.

I don't know why, but a lot of younger people seem to have trouble seeing the subtlety in older books and movies. There's nothing in what Holden says that indicates Salinger wanted us to think Holden had been molested. He's just talking about guys who came on to him or attempted to get in his pants.

he was being hit on and it was creepy and weird but NOT molestation.

it was creepy because it was much older guy and trusted former instructor.

Wasn't he dead the whole time or is that the M Night screenplay

This thread gets an 8.5 out of 10. The power of DL can be used for good.

As someone pointed out, it was published a couple of years before Rebel Without a Cause. Teenage angst was a "thing" back then which also fed into TV shows like Patty Duke, Dobie Gillis and My Three Sons.

I'd also opine that teenagers as a demographic only emerged in the 20th century. And just like teens today are all over social media, back than they were consumed with mass media - movies, TV and radio.

Contrast that with 19th century literature - Dickens, the Brontës - where the stories followed characters from childhood to adulthood but there was no angst-ridden in between period we associated with teens now. I think that's what makes Catcher a landmark in literature.

I first read it in the mid 70's and it knocked me sideways. I was a teenage boy reading a first-person narrative by another teen boy... I didn't know a book could be like that.

I don't think I've read it since my 20's, but based on some of the comments here I might revisit it. I don't for one second believe Holden was gay but (from memory) the older brother aspiring to be a Hollywood writer sounded suspicious. 146 posts and no one else has raised that?

The older brother is clearly supposed to be Salinger. "D. B. Caulfield." Former short story writer, now in Hollywood. Salinger maybe never tried to be a screenwriter but he did sell a story to the movies around that time.

[quote] I don't for one second believe Holden was gay but (from memory) the older brother aspiring to be a Hollywood writer sounded suspicious. 146 posts and no one else has raised that?

Probably because D.B. didn’t leap out as anything sexually. He was another example to Holden of someone becoming an adult and turning into another phony, in D.B.’s case betraying his art to write for shitty Hollywood movies.

[quote] I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all. He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me.

Unlike Holden, Salinger loved movies. In his house in NH, he had a collection of films (before VHS or DVDs) and a projector, and showed old Hollywood movies like Casablanca and Lost Horizon all the time. Joyce Maynard mentioned this in her memoirs, that included details of their affair when she was 18 and he was 53.

My Foolish Heart which is adapted from Uncle Wiggly In Connecticut is streaming on Amazon Prime and Kanopy if you want to see what so turned Salinger so off Hollywood.

Susan Hayward is great in My Foolish Heart. That has to be my favorite performance of hers. Co-starring Dana Andrews, with Kent Smith, Robert Keith and Jessie Royce Landis.

It's also the only film of Lois Wheeler, who was a Broadway actress (All My Sons). Later as the wife of Edgar Snow she had a long history with Red China.

^Had a very famous theme song by Victor Young, and was directed by Mark (Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls) Robson.

I like Catcher. I absolutely understand why it had such a strangle hold on generations of young readers.

But I always felt Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour was Salinger's master work.

Isn't Catcher in the Rye one of the few he wrote that isn't about the Glass family?

R141 I agree. Easy to read too much into that. Again, Salinger IS Holden. And, I would imagine, assuming he was attractive and raised in the same upperclass NYC world as Holden, older men would occasionally express interest or make passes.

I was kind of proud of myself when, as a teenager, I saw a movie poster in a book, for Dear Ruth (1948, I think). It starred William Holden and Joan Caulfield, and the last names, in capital letters, were larger than the first names, spelling, on the poster, HOLDEN CAULFIELD. I even mentioned this to a teacher who said, "Probably just a coincidence." Anyway, now it's acknowledged that that's where Salinger got the name.

I liked most that the book is well-written. Even at its basic level, it’s a breezy read

[quote] he was being hit on and it was creepy and weird but NOT molestation. it was creepy because it was much older guy and trusted former instructor.

Agreed, the point seems to be that at this particular point in this life Holden has no one who can provide him comfort in the adult world, no matter how messily he seems to reach out for it.

But to Gen Z on Reddit, a teenager being propositioned by older people = molestation. And thus this novel is a trauma memoir, not because of all the multitude of reasons that Holden finds it impossible to exist in society, but because he is a VICTIM.

I look at the novel (and some other Salinger writings) a bit differently, now, though, after finding out he had several relationships with teenage women as an older man. They were of age, I guess, but these relationships were basically toxic. Salinger wrote a lot about teens and younger adults. So he was putting himself in their place, trying to think like these characters, to write them. It's like he was psychologically stuck, never really writing very much about mature people. Or if he did, it was often about their interactions with kids and young adults.

[quote]...assuming he was attractive...

My first glimpse of JDS was on the back of my parents' original UK Penguin paperback of CITR. His author photo showed him as resembling Pacino in Godfather 1. Far from unattractive. (Wish I still had that copy.)

R161 right so a good looking kid in that world who seemingly travels around as independently as Holden does would certainly have been propositioned or have had passed made at him by older men. I don't know that Holden was meant to have been abused.

Having someone make a tepid pass at you is not the same as being harassed or abused.

I don't think there's much similarity between The Catcher in the Rye and Bonjour Tristesse. Other than teenage narrators.

James Kirkwood's "Good Times Bad Times" was a much better teenage coming of age novel than Catcher, which I found boring as a kid (i.e. forced to read it in school). In GTBT, the two main characters were very tight prep school friends and while depicted as straight, there are undercurrents of a gay dynamic---it takes place in the late '60s after all. The pervy headmaster (who molests one of them in a massage scene) gets murdered too which I also liked...so it definitely held my interest. Nothing happens in Catcher but a whiny, humorless cunt who pisses and moans non stop.

Catcher is overrated, just like Gatsby. Sacrilege I know...

Did R108 just plagiarize "Six Degrees of Separation" ?

It's not a gay novel so why are you whores obsessing over it?

R167 are we only allowed to discuss gay things? And, if you actually read the thread, it could be argued that its a gay novel. Or gay adjacent at the very least

Arent there a lot of phonies in it?

[quote]It's not a gay novel so why are you whores obsessing over it?

Troubled bright sensitive alienated expressive young man faces the real world. This situation is not unknown to gay people.

R170 Thank you. As I said up threads, as a closeted gay teen, Holden spoke to me. I loved him.

I hate it when some dumbbell complains a topic isn't gay enough to talk about on DL.

Thread full of fraus.

You just about kill me, r173. It’s “Frauen”, you goddamn phony.

I'm not German, R174. 'Frau' is a slang word and its plural is 'fraus'.

You bitches would argue about shoelaces.

r164 They were each enormously popular with disaffected youth.

The idiosyncratic narrative voice and calling out of all things phony was what made me love Catcher. I still like it at age 56. J.D. Salinger had a remarkable, uncanny brilliance with dialogue, too. He's one of my favorites. Maybe that reflects an immature taste. I don't know.

In any event, I think it's a novel worth teaching, just as much as, say, Nabokov (another genius of narrative voice) or Melville.

Goddamn phonies with your stupidity, r175, are no doubt off in Hollywood, being prostitutes. And unlike my brother, D.B., you’re not successful.

For a teacher, your syntax and punctuation is a bit subpar OP.

Fiction is for students afraid of the truth.

Your high school lit teacher was badmouthing fiction? Odd choice of profession.

That teacher was lit, dude.

R181 I hope he was being ironic because that is such a stupid, reductive comment.

[quote]Fiction is for students afraid of the truth.

Such an obvious ludicrous debate opening, hoping for any bright student to bite. It's not as though love, death, sex, class, ambition, competition, conflict and all complex insights therein don't constitute truth. The novel form hasn't lasted since Don Quixote solely as escapism.

And art is for people afraid of blank walls?

Catcher In The Rear