Review: The Catcher in the Rye

I needed a book to read a few weeks ago so I decided to start scouring Mike’s bookshelf as he had recommended a few novels over the years that I had never ended up reading. The first one to catch my eye was one that he had not recommended but I knew I had wanted to read it for some time: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

I didn’t know what to expect from the novel. I knew it was a grand piece of North American literature. I knew that a lot of people had read it in high school. I really had no idea what the novel was about.

The story follows Holden Caulfield, a student at a prep school who has flunked out and is heading back to his parents place in New York City. Turns out that he has flunked out of a few prep schools and it doesn’t seem that he is too interested in much in life.

The narrative is very cynical and it reads from the first person perspective of Holden. He is always annoyed with everyone and how fake they are. I swear every second word is ‘god damn’ which I thought must have had to be a big deal back in 1951 when it was published. I wanted to ask Nanny about that actually.

All in all, I personally found the novel to be quite boring. For the longest time while reading it, I was thinking “Alright, where’s the hook? What’s going to happen? All there is is Holden complaining about everything and him getting closer and closer to his parents place back home.” I really had to churn through the novel. At one point I had mentioned to Amelia that I was reading it and finding it very lacklustre and she mentioned that it was her husbands’ favourite book and she enjoyed it as well so I thought that maybe there was a glorious ending to it and I sped through to the end.

I was left disappointed as there was no amazing twist (thank you makers of the television show Lost for making me expect a grand twist at the end of every story I ever read again) and overall, I couldn’t really understand why this was considered a grand piece of literature.

After speaking with Mike, Krista and others, I have gathered that for the time, the novel was a breakthrough in storytelling in this manner. There was not a lot of first person narratives, let alone one with some foul language and a dismal outlook on life. Plus, it went through some pretty interesting topics for its time…drinking alcohol, seeing prostitutes…it must have been a big deal at the time back in 1951.

I compare this novel to the same feeling kids nowadays must get when we show them the old cartoons we grew up with and they laugh and say “The special effects were so cheesy! How could you like this?!”. It’s all a matter of perspective and I figure I would have enjoyed this more if I had read it in a more appropriate time period. As a story, it just wasn’t that interesting to me and did not shock me in any way.