Review: The Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger

I said it at age 15 and I'll say it again at 27.  

It is really, really hard to write anything profound about J.D. Salinger's The Catcher In the Rye.

Holden Caulfield, 16 years old, has just been dismissed from his fourth prep school.  Overcome with feelings and emotions that he is unable to sort out, he makes a spur-of-the-moment decision to take the train to his hometown in New York City, and spend three days before Christmas living on his own, observing the human race, in a sort of self-seeking adventure.  What follows is Holden's first-person written account of a life-altering experience, altogether vivid and subdued, the writings of a child-adult desperate for answers and innocence in a world he views as eminently corrupt.

This is one of my favorite books, read for the first time as a very, very innocent sophomore at a Catholic girls' school, and since then I've probably read it cover-to-cover at least fifteen times.  After my first reading, my grandfather told me that it was one of the best books of the 20th century, and asked me what it was precisely that I liked about it.  I couldn't give him an answer then, and even now, I'm not sure that I could give one.  The best I can sum it up in is three words.

It's Holden's voice.  It's Holden's caustic honesty, the way that he struggles and bleeds all over the pages of Catcher.  It's his desperation to find some meaning in life, as he flails about trying to find a stronghold at the age of only 16, battling depression and juvenile disillusionment and being unable to cope with either of them.  It's the way that you can give this book to almost any teenager, the most jaded, the least matured, and they will still understand it.  Holden is the archetypal teenager.  Most of the negative reviews I have read for Catcher have, I found, been written by adults.  I'm not trying to say that you can't enjoy Catcher when you read it for the first time as an adult...but I do believe that Holden makes more sense to a teenager.

The one thing I love about this book is that it transcends time, gender, and interest.  My husband, who never, ever reads, saw me reading Catcher this past week and said "That is the only book I ever really liked when I had to read it in school."  Five stars then, five stars now.

Rating: *****