★★★★★ Trying to be a good guy without quite knowing how

The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger

I was recently reminded of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, a book I last read about 50 years ago. I remembered that I liked it a lot, and that it was short. Also, it takes place around Christmas. So I thought, "Why not?" and picked it up again.

It holds up. The story is told in the first person by sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield, a rich kid who is just flunking out of the third or fourth prep school in a row. He takes off on his own to wander around New York City. Holden makes Catcher in the Rye for me. I really like him. Now, to be clear, I don't mean that I would want to meet Holden in the flesh. He's a liar and a creep whose conversation would exhaust my limited supply of patience in 15 seconds. But underneath all that, he's fundamentally a good guy trapped in a world that he can't make work for him.

For instance, Holden is a virgin, a fact that looms large in his self-image. He is a virgin because he doesn't want to have sex with girls unless he likes them a lot, and because he won't force himself on unwilling girls. This may seem the bare minimum of decency, but it is not the attitude that a teenage boy in his world is supposed to have toward sex. For his male classmates sex is like capturing Pokemons -- the more you catch, the more points you get, and some are worth more points than others. It's a game teenage boys are expected to try to win, and Holden is lousy at it. He is honestly ashamed of himself for being lousy at sex-Pokemon and thinks he ought to be better (by which I mean worse). Holden is smart enough to see the bars of the cage he's caught in, but not, at sixteen, imaginative enough to realize he could just walk through them.

This is all summed up in the image of the Catcher in the Rye. You will not hear about the Catcher in the Rye until you have read 80% of the book -- it comes up in a conversation with his ten-year-old sister Phoebe. The last 20% of the book is all about Holden and Phoebe, and it is by far the sweetest part of the story. Holden is his best self with Phoebe, and those last pages left me with a feeling of warmth and even joy.

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