Posted on 12/31/2018 8:35:31 AM PST by Borges
Tuesday is J.D. Salinger’s 100th birthday, but Holden Caulfield is still 17. The iconic teenager of “The Catcher in the Rye” is forever suspended in the amber of our youthful alienation.
Although a few pious schools continue to ban Salinger’s only published novel, for millions of adults, a faded copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” is a sweet teenage treasure, as transgressive as a trophy from band camp. Ninth-graders who secretly read the book with a flashlight when it came out in 1951 are now in their 80s.
To read it again as an adult is to feel Holden’s pain lingering like a phantom limb. His righteous cynicism is adolescence distilled into a sweet liquor. But the novel also feels like revisiting your first house. The familiarity is enchanting but discombobulating. The story is smaller than you remember, and some details you had completely wrong. But what’s most striking is how common the novel’s tone has become over the intervening decades. Holden is Patient Zero for generations infected by his misanthropy. We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Birthday? he’s dead, Jim.
Was it ever?
It’s pretty straightforward and was a best seller at the time. We aren’t talking about James Joyce here.
Only the good die young. It’s not generally true but in this case........
I thought it was horse sh*t.
A book about a young bastard who moans about his life is so bad, without e ever trying to do anything positive to change his life.
Typical of the Marxist mindset
I tried to read the book twice.
I just cannot identify with an effeminate pussy.
During WW2, Salinger was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.
Salinger was a Marxist? Have you ever read about him and his lifestyle?
That sicko book killed John Lennon
Always just reminds me of the guy who killed John Lennon (and I’m not naming him on purpose. I don’t want to give him any notoriety).
He claimed he was like Holden Caulfield, catching the children who might go over the edge of a cliff in the rye by killing John.
A misinterpretation of Robert Burns’s Comin’ Through the Rye, he believed that to be the “catcher in the rye” meant to save children from losing their innocence.
It’s been so long since I read it I can’t even remember what it was about. But it’s been longer since I read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and I remember everything about those books. Maybe Salinger just wasn’t that memorable.
Had to read it during an extended NYC teacher’s strike.
I went to a makeshift public-school-substitute during the strike at a Hebrew school, where it was assigned.
At least for us, a teacher’s strike was not a vacation.
That was in the olden days kids had to read that. Now they have to read Rules for radicals, the Communist manifesto and Living History.
Probably one of the more painful books I ever had to read was in college - English lit to be exact.
It was Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
A truly miserable experience from start to finish. It was so frickin’ bad I even went to the bookstore and bought a copy of Cliff’s Notes.
If we ever decide to start torturing Gitmo detainees, this would be a good way to do it. Make them read it and then have to discuss it with an English Lit professor.
“That sicko book killed John Lennon.”
And Jody Foster shot President Reagan.
Makes a lot of sense.
Go read your pervert book. It screws up kids minds. Look at the generation that read it, and look at what they became.
It killed John Lennon.
Read his bio on Wikipedia. He definitely quit while he was well-ahead.
He apparently didn’t quit writing, he quit publishing.
It’s condemnatory of perverts.
“Go read your pervert book. It screws up kids minds. Look at the generation that read it, and look at what they became.
It killed John Lennon.”
John Lennon was not killed by a book.
Reagan was not shot by a movie.
A book cannot screw up a kid’s mind
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