Since its publication in 1951, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye has been the favored bildungsroman novel of the American teen. At least it was, that is, before the arrival of the current generation of discerning readers:
Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.” . . .
“Holden Caulfield is supposed to be this paradigmatic teenager we can all relate to, but we don’t really speak this way or talk about these things,” Ms. Levenson said, summarizing a typical response. At the public charter school where she used to teach, she said, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’ “
When I first read Catcher (circa 1986) I thought it was one of most profound novels I’d ever read (of course at the time I thought the same about Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, so my literary judgment was suspect). But when my sixteen-year-old daughter recently read the book her verdict was quite different: Holden Caulfield is a pathetic bore.
Her assessment is similar to the fifteen-year-old boy from Long Island who, according to the Times, told an expert on children’s literature: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’”
June 22nd, 2009 | 2:32 pm
Invariably it takes many years for a society to decide on what to call a classic, even when the number of books to be sifted through in times past was limited to a few hundred. Would it be an exaggeration to suspect we have more authors today than readers? Of our thousands of new books, only time will sift out the 99% of them that will not be worth reprinting 100 years from now. But the value of a classic never fades. And since we have only one life to live, I’ve made it a rule for myself never to read a book under 80 years old (at least), unless the reviews are overpoweringly convincing and expressed by a small minority of truly discerning literary pundits (e.g., for the works of J.R.R. Tolkien). In general, it’s best to play it safe and read what has survived the ravages of time and popular fads. And, if you run out of books to read? C.S. Lewis reminds us, “If you have only read a great book once, you have not read it at all” (An Experiment in Criticism). Benjamin Disraeli admitted he had read Pride and Prejudice seventeen times. I like to recall that Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died on the same day in the same year (April 23, 1616). With the exponential demographic explosion of the 20th century, should we not expect a proportionate increase in literary geniuses? How long will it take us to find out who they are?
June 22nd, 2009 | 3:02 pm
Yes, I felt similarly about him when I read the book for the first time a few years ago (I was about 21 at the time, so I was slightly past the target demographic). He’s whiny and unlikable. However, I still found myself appreciating the book, because I came to view him as an interesting object of compassion and pity.
What I felt for him was not so much sympathy, but more like magnanimity: he was a very undeserving little prodigal, but I somehow felt kindness toward him anyway, perhaps because he was so pathetic and unlikable.
This response might be the result of my religious beliefs, and perhaps a non-Christian couldn’t be expected to have a similar feeling.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact