The Books: “The Catcher In the Rye” (J.D. Salinger)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

Like most people, I had to read the book in high school. I read it in 10th grade – the formative year, one of the best classes (to this day) I have ever had. Mr. Crothers was the teacher – and we all called him “The Crud”. TO HIS FACE. And yet it was somehow endearing. A nickname, not an insult. Hand raises at end of class. “Crud, will there be a quiz on the next chapter?” So hysterical, looking back on it. I’ve written before about that English class. The Crud taught me to write. Now I already knew how to write (as should be OBVIOUS) but The Crud taught me how to write a paper. I’ve written before about that struggle, and how difficult it was – how I got my first D in his class – in an ENGLISH class!! where I had always shone – and then worked my ass off and got a C – and then got a case of writer’s block so bad that I remember throwing myself onto my parents bed and bursting into sobs because I had to write a paper for the next day and I couldn’t even start … but I eventually started. And I got a C+. Crud was a hard-ass! When I got a B in that class, it was a major moment. It really meant something. The Crud knew how to construct a paper. Thesis statement, paragraph A, Paragraph B, how to back up your thoughts with text and quotes, how to structure your thoughts, how to get your freakin’ act together so you could actually say something. I was only in 10th grade but I got As on every paper I wrote in college, and it is all due to The Crud. I knew how to do it. It’s a great example of giving a teenager a tool. Or – no – not “giving” but making me work for it. Thank you, Crud! But in addition to the paper-writing skills I learned, we read the following in that class: Moby Dick (excerpt here), Tale of Two Cities (excerpt here), The Great Gatsby (excerpt here), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (excerpt here), Catcher in the Rye – it was a heavy year of book-reading. I’ve written before about deciding, in 2001, to go back and re-read all of the books I had been forced to read and hated in high school. So that meant that Tale of Two Cities, The Great Gatsby and Catcher In the Rye were not on the list – because I had loved them instantly. My 15 year old self thrilled to those books the first time around. I count Tale of Two Cities as one of my favorite novels ever. But Moby Dick Tess? Ew. So what a pleasure it was to go back, as an adult, and re-read these books. Because I wanted to. It was SO awesome and I highly recommend doing that, if you haven’t. Take, especially, the book you hated most. That’s the one you need to read. I recently re-read Billy Budd (post about it here), a book that literally made us ANGRY in high school we hated it so much … and you know what? I still didn’t like it. Too clearly allegorical. Too Christian-y simplistic. “Oh! So … Billy Budd with his BLONDE HAIR and Greek physique …. is ‘good’? And Mr. Claggart, with his dark hair and dark eyes … is ‘evil’? WHO KNEW???” Boring. But I HAD to face it again, because my prejudices against it were so ingrained, and I just cannot let such prejudice stand! An unexamined life is not worth living and all that. So because I went back and did this I had the unbelievable excitement of reading Moby Dick – my God, what a book – and all the others.

Anyway, like I said The Catcher In the Rye was not on that “must read again” books, because from the time I read it in high school it found a place in my heart forever.

I know lots of people who go back and re-read the book and find it annoying, or self-pitying – but I don’t find it that way at all. He’s a teenager, first of all. Teenagers are annoying and often self-pitying – so I just find the voice to be true. Also, if he seems self-pitying, I think he has a damn right to indulge in that a bit – because of the death of his beloved brother Allie. It makes sense to me. But that’s neither here nor there. I also wonder if … well, I still read “young adult” fiction for fun. I love books geared for teenagers. I still go back and re-read Judy Blume, for God’s sake, and Madeleine L’Engle and Beverly Cleary … and those books obviously are ground-level books for kids. It gets in the muck with kids and they don’t condescend … it takes their concerns seriously. The Catcher In the Rye is a more prickly book, obviously – more obviously geared for adults – but the sensibility is adolescent. I remember talking to the doppelganger once about it, and he said something like, “There’s a reason why every maniac who goes with a gun into a clocktower has a copy of this book in his back pocket.” It definitely can speak to the outsider, the freak, the kid who feels “misunderstood” – all of those things that people eventually grow out of, and learn to get along with their fellow man, etc.

So as a piece of literature – just that, not a treatise, not a book that made me feel validated, not a book that feels written by my own soul – just a piece of literature – I think it works beautifully. It is a classic case of “VOICE”. The VOICE of the book is key. Holden Caulfield’s voice. I mentioned this a couple days ago in my post about Mating (excerpt here), another book with a first-person narrator whom many people find unbearably annoying. If you can’t get past your annoyance of the voice telling the story, you’ll probably hate the book. I am trying to think of an example of a book where I felt that annoyance. Nothing comes to mind right now, but I know I have experienced it. But not with Catcher In the Rye. I love Holden Caulfield. I just love him. My love for him is different now than it was when I was a teenager – so he’s one of those characters who seems to have grown right along with me. I thought the book was a RIOT when I read it in high school. Not just the events, like with the hooker, or the headmaster of his school – although these are comic events … but the VOICE. I just thought how Holden Caulfield talked, and his random ‘goddam’s that don’t seem connected to anything – his sudden bursts of irritation and italics – was absolutely HYSTERICAL. I re-read the book a couple years ago and I don’t think I laughed once. Or maybe I did, I’m exaggerating, but the overwhelming feeling I got from the book was sadness. A deep awful almost unbearable ache. I wanted to hold Holden Caulfield and let him cry it out. All I felt was his grief about his brother’s death and how everyone thinks he’s weird for not being “over it” yet. It was awful!! No wonder he cracks up at the end watching Phoebe on the carousel! No wonder he’s institutionalized!

To be honest (see, there I am talking like Holden) – I’m a Franny and Zooey girl myself. Now THAT book spoke outloud my innermost soul … that book actually made me make some significant changes in my life, because I had an “A-ha!” moment reading it … Catcher In the Rye, to me, is just a damn good read. And a book with one of the most distinctive unforgettable “voices” I have ever heard.

Oh. And reading this book, I still can remember, sometimes word for word, some of The Crud’s lectures on it. I remember what he pointed out, I remember what he told us to look for, I remember his observations. Man. That’s a good teacher. 10th grade and I still remember those lectures.

One of the most lasting things I took from Holden Caulfield – and it was reiterated by dad – was a contempt for phonies. Give me a douchebag any day. But spare me the phonies.

Here’s an excerpt I have always loved.

EXCERPT FROM The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

She was a funny girl, old Jane. I wouldn’t exactly describe her as strictly beautiful. She knocked me out, though. She was sort of muckle-mouthed. I mean when she was talking and she got excited about something, her mouth sort of went in about fifty directions, her lips and all. That killed me. And she never really closed it all the way, her mouth. It was always just a little bit open, especially when she got in her golf stance, or when she was reading a book. She was always reading, and she read very good books. She read a lot of poetry and all. She was the only one, outside my family, that I ever showed Allie’s baseball mitt to, with all the poems written on it. She’d never met Allie or anything, because that was her first summer in Maine – before that, she went to Cape Cod – but I told her quite a lot about him. She was interested in that kind of stuff.

My mother didn’t like her too much. I mean my mother always thought Jane and her mother were sort of snubbing her or something when they didn’t say hello. My mother saw them in the village a lot, because Jane used to drive to market with her mother in this LaSalle convertible they had. My mother didn’t think Jane was pretty, even. I did, though. I just liked the way she looked, that’s all.

I remember one afternoon. It was the only time old Jane and I ever got close to necking, even. It was a Saturday and it was raining like a bastard out, and I was over at her house, on the porch – they had this big screened-in porch. We were playing checkers. I used to kid her once in a while because she wouldn’t take her kings out of the back row. But I didn’t kid her much, though. You never wanted to kid Jane too much. I think I really like it best when you can kid the pants off a girl when the opportunity arises, but it’s a funny thing. The girls I like best are the ones I never feel much like kidding. Sometimes I think they’d like it if you kidded them – in fact, I know they would – but it’s hard to get started, once you’ve known them a pretty long time and never kidded them. Anyway, I was telling you about that afternoon Jane and I came close to necking. It was raining like hell and we were out on the porch, and all of a sudden this booze hound her mother was married to came out on the porch and asked Jane if there were any cigarettes in the house. I didn’t know him too well or anything, but he looked like the kind of guy that wouldn’t talk to you much unless he wanted something off you. He had a lousy personality. Anyway, old Jane wouldn’t answer him when he asked her if she knew where there was any cigarettes. So the guy asked her again, but she still wouldn’t answer him. She didn’t even look up from the game. Finally the guy went inside the house. When he did, I asked Jane what the hell was going on. She wouldn’t even answer me, then. She made out like she was concentrating on her next move in the game and all. Then all of a sudden, this tear plopped down on the checkerboard. On one of the red squares – boy, I can still see it. She just rubbed it into the board with her finger. I don’t know why, but it bothered hell out of me. So what I did was, I went over and made her move over on the glider so that I could sit down next to her – I practically sat down in her lap, as a matter of fact. Then she really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over – anywhere – her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows and all, her ears – her whole face except her mouth and all. She sort of wouldn’t let me get to her mouth. Anyway, it was the closest we ever got to necking. After a while, she got up and went in and put on this red and white sweater she had, that knocked me out, and we went to a goddam movie. I asked her, on the way, if Mr. Cudahy – that was the booze hound’s name – had ever tried to get wise with her. She was pretty young, but she had this terrific figure, and I wouldn’t’ve put it past that Cudahy bastard. She said no, though. I never did find out what the hell was the matter. Some girls you practically never find out what’s the matter.

I don’t want you to get the idea she was a goddam icicle or something, just because we never necked or horsed around much. She wasn’t. I held hands with her all the time, for instance. That doesn’t sound like much, I realize, but she was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they’d bore you or something. Jane was different. We’d get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we’d start holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.