I think I was probably thirteen or fourteen when I had to read The Catcher in the Rye and really the only memorable thing I took away from the book was how intensely I hated Holden Caufield. But here I am fifteen years later and a friend’s been pressuring me to revisit the book and I thought, you know, what the hell, I mean I’m twenty-nine and I’m not exactly a fan of that thirteen- or fourteen-year-old who purports to have been me and who so intensely hated Holden Caufield and so the chances are pretty good that that little brat was wrong and I may as well give it the old college try.
So here I am reading it again and much to my surprise I’m really bonding with the thirteen-year-old me because it turns out Holden is just as despicable now as he ever was. He’s just so easy to hate, everything about him, this privileged little prep school snot who honestly believes the world is out to get him and that everyone else is a “phony” and—and god help me that voice, that grating, disrespectful, childish, infantile voice—has there ever been a more offensive narrator in the history of Western literature?
I continue reading and I keep right on hating him with every turn of every page but I trudge along anyway because I told her I would and I’m racking my brain the whole way trying to figure out why this guy has endured for so long and how a character so shallow and so bereft of anything even remotely resembling meaning could be so widely lauded and so universally celebrated and I’m reading this screed and thinking, my god, if history is any guide then fifty years from now people are going to be talking about Bret Easton Ellis the same way they speak of Salinger today.
But I do my best to try to understand this character and detect his weaknesses and locate his flaws so that maybe I can get a handle on what all the craze is all about, but he’s just so relentlessly shallow, so obviously flawed, so trivial to deconstruct, and I’m really starting to worry that no matter how much effort I put into this he’s just not going to develop or mature in any meaningful way and that I’m just wasting my time because, I mean, a bildungsroman without any bildung is just an angsty teenager’s LiveJournal.
So I keep right on going through the motions and, yeah, the kid’s got issues: anyone caught being even remotely human or carnal or falling in love or being afraid is just plain “mad” and he’s got a mommy complex and he’s all kinds of self-conscious and mostly just doesn’t want Maurice to see him in his pajamas and isn’t about to hurl himself through a hotel window because he doesn’t want to look like James Castle—at least not if anyone else can see him—and he hates cinema and theater and actors because he loathes any representation of human emotion just as much as he avoids the genuine article and—well, the list goes on.
And then he flips out on Sally and has a little bit too much to drink and embarrasses himself in front of Luce and then goes looking for the ducks again and I’m like Oh, yeah, the ducks, pretty much the closest thing this book has come so far to quality imagery, and it’s then that I begin to realize that the pages remaining between my right thumb and forefinger are quickly dwindling and I get that sinking feeling in my stomach that this book is just going to end on me, without any sort of a payoff, but then he’s talking with Phoebe and at last he’s at least somewhat fucking endearing but still I’m thinking he’s got a long way to go before this afternoon doesn’t feel like a complete waste and then he hits me—
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.
—and that’s when I fall apart, that’s when all of a sudden I actually care about this kid, because all he wants is his childhood back, all he wants is a little taste of the old innocence, back when Jane was just a checkers partner and not just another girl in the back seat of that Buick with Stradlater, back before the impressionable young boys were sent off to school to form their tribal little cliques and be trained by their elders in what girls were for and why flits were bad, and that’s why I was so upset when he runs out on Antolini, because he’d already been corrupted too long ago by the likes of Luce that in the moment when he meets his very own catcher in the rye his only instinct is to run, and by the time his thoughts caught up with him it was already too late.
And so I started thinking about how maybe everything I ever hated about Holden is everything I ever hated about myself, and how maybe the only reason I get so angry with him every time he breaks down and cries is because when I was his age and I hadn’t yet been so thoroughly desensitized by the steady torrent of disappointments of life that I, too, I could still cry back then, and even though now I know all the cues and I know when I’m supposed to no matter how much I try I just can’t bring myself to do it, to do this, the most primal of human urges, the very first thing I did when I entered this world and yet the last thing I seem capable of doing today.
And I think of how what Holden wants most of all is to protect his mother from bad news, and how when I ran away from home at eighteen I didn’t call my mother until six months later from a pay phone in Lake Tahoe, and I think about how many sleepless nights she must have spent worrying about her son, how mortified she must have been to learn that I was 3,000 miles away, and how guilty I still feel all these years later because she’s my mother and I was supposed to be protecting her from the bad news.
And I think of how we’re basically destined to spend the rest of our lives second-guessing ourselves and constantly turning over in our minds every last “what if?”, and how this exercise is only going to become all the more oppressive the longer we live, and how every passing year puts a little more distance between ourselves and the time in our lives when we never had to speak those two unfortunate words, “if only”.
And I think about how this must be why we have kids, because of how cruel this distance is, and how easy it is for us to treat someone else to that singular, momentary joy.
