What really knocked readers out about “The Catcher in the Rye” was the wonderfully immediate voice that J. D. Salinger fashioned for Holden Caulfield ”” a voice that enabled him to channel an alienated 16-year-old’s thoughts and anxieties and frustrations, a voice that skeptically appraised the world and denounced its phonies and hypocrites and bores.
Mr. Salinger had such unerring radar for the feelings of teenage angst and vulnerability and anger that “Catcher,” published in 1951, remains one of the books that adolescents first fall in love with ”” a book that intimately articulates what it is to be young and sensitive and precociously existential, a book that first awakens them to the possibilities of literature.
Sorry, but I’ve always considered “Catcher” a crashing bore. Have done since high school.
You are not alone Mr. Miller. And I don’t think bringing the concept of teenage angst into the culture was doing us a favor.
The Glass Family Saga was really Salinger’s masterwork. [i]Franny and Zooey[/i] is one of the most profound treatments of spirituality written by a mainstream author in the 20th century. In addition to its other virtues, it led millions of us to investigate the Eastern Orthodox prayer tradition.
I enjoyed the book. Teenage angst has been in the culture forever and in literature for a long time. It’s even in scripture – see Luke 15:11-32. And Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet, among others.
Let 1 and 2 grump, it is still a wonderful novel and one I have no hesitation in recommending to young people of all ages.
I haven’t read much Salinger in the last thirty years, just as I haven’t read much Thomas Wolfe, but they are still in my mind because they understood teenage angst in America on an Elvisian scale of importance, as something already existing, to be discovered, not invented, and sung as white blues to their generations.
I read The Catcher in my early teens as a school set book. I didn’t rate it, probably because I was too young, and too literal. I reread it in my very late teens and thought it was excellent, and for the first time had an insight into those for whom with mental illness, their world gradually melts away. I assume Salinger may have been writing from personal experience of breakdown and thus could write so powerfully from Holden Caulfield’s perspective. Given Salinger’s reclusiveness we really don’t know, which is presumably what he wanted.
Armed with that I tried Franny and Zooey, but again it left me cold. Perhaps I had too high expectations at that age, but should perhaps give it another go in the light of #3 Dale Rye’s comment.
5:
Is it necessary to negate their opinions and label them as ‘grumps’?