Replies

Ah, what an interesting topic. I first read Catcher all of three years ago in my sophomore year of high school. I remember being struck most by the whole concept of this teenager completely slipping out of his environment, his role as a student at some private boarding school, and heading over to New York City to wander around for a while as if it were a "vacation." Admittedly I was at first sympathetic, even taken, with Holden's whole "philosophy" of criticizing every "phony" he came into contact with (although I do remember him being a gentleman to a group of nuns at one point, or something to that effect). But in some of the retrospective looks I've taken since maturing, I'd hope, over the years, I think it's pretty clear that Holden was intended as a look at the hypocrisy of adolescents. All the angst and projection is meant to be seen as a phase of sorts, one brought on by the transition from a childish outlook to a mature one on the world. Unfortunately too many people - including more adults than you'd expect - seem to ignore this and see Holden as some sort of brave dissenter decrying the hypocrisies of society, etc. I hold, conceding to not know much about the author, that it was Salinger's intention for Holden to be the most hypocritical of all. But, hey, I thought it was a good enough book, just that people take the wrong message and run away with it.

And yeah, take my word for it as I just left the public high school system behind, there is definitely some sort of concerted effort, literariture-wise, to canonize crap. Don't get me wrong, some of the required reading was good - Golding's Lord of the Flies, Huxley's Brave New World, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (a novel about a mentally disturbed Vietnam vet who runs for political office but loses in a landslide when it's revealed that he took part in the My Lai massacre... hmm... if only), Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, both of which were a lot better than I ever expected, and some others. But then there were some real stinkers too. Most notably Chopin's The Awakening, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and The Bad Seed, the author of which I can't bother to remember. Also noteworthy was A Prayer for Owen Meany which, while pretty good at times, kept having the narrative jump into the future at random intervals so the protagonist could whine for 3-4 pages about how much he hated Ronald Reagan, all completely out of context. Pretty poor writing. There was also a list of books to choose from for summer reading one year, and every single book on the list, no matter which you picked, revolved entirely around the theme of how miserable life in America is for minorities. Smells like PC agenda...

And that's about a wrap. No Hemingway, no Mark Twain, not even Tolkien. I found it much more useful to circumvent the high school "canon" and read some things on my own. I'd be willing to wager I've gotten more out of Burgess's Clockwork Orange, the "mature" writings of C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, Till We Have Faces), Homer's Odyssey, and Plato and Aristotle than I had in four years of high school required reading. They weren't all stinkers, but there was definitely the presence of a PC/liberal-driven agenda.