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Palatinate book club: The Catcher in the Rye

23 February 2010

Catcher in the Rye is  famously popular. It’s also short, which initially endeared it to me, and my edition of Adrian Mole said that it was “the best book since Catcher in the Rye” on the blurb on the back.

It is a great book for re-reading. Again, this is partly because it’s short. But at least in my mind, Catcher’s plot is so unmemorable, that you never feel as if you’re repeating yourself.

There’s a place for the proto-mythic awareness of plot that we have for something like A Christmas Carol or The Matrix but Catcher is a novel that does not need your attention. The novel takes your gaze and turns it back on your own self.

Not in any serious way, of course. It is not a serious book. Think how many times it uses the word ‘phoney’. In his narration Caulfield is knowingly yet artlessly, shabbily consumed with the reader.

Catcher was Salinger’s only novel, so why has it achieved such a lasting place on our bookshelves? Ask yourself why you picked it up. The outstanding feature of the novel is, of course, its popularity.

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  1. Palatinate book club: The Catcher in the Rye
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  • Sarah Ingrams

    There can be no doubt about the sheer popularity of Catcher in the Rye: it was included in Time Magazine’s 2005 list of the 100 best selling English language novels written since 1923 and has been translated into numerous languages. However, surely this suggests that the novel has more to reccommend it than being merely short and unmemorable?

    Agreed, the novel’s popularity has been exaccerbated by its mythical status as a ‘banned book’ (it was the most censored book in high schools in the United States between 1961 and 1982), attracting a readership keen to be shocked by its concent. However its censorship ended over thirty years ago but The Catcher in The Rye is still a name on many people’s lips.

    The novel comments on the superficiality of life through the frequent use of ‘phoney’ and Holden Caulfield’s dislike of films, as the ultimate in ‘phoney’, prompts readers to question the nature and validity of art forms, including the novel in their hands.

    Although I wouldn’t go as far as some critics in associating the novel with existentialist phoilosophy, I believe that The Catcher in the Rye
    retains its popularity because it is a defining work on what it is like to be a teenager. True, times have changed and the colloquial language of 1940s America is perhaps not easy to identify with, but Holden’s feelings of being at various times disaffected, disgruntled, alienated, isolated, directionless and sarcastic are those that the modern reader cannot fail to appreciate and associate with. Perhaps The Catcher in the Rye is more relevant than ever before as Holden’s emotions are felt increasingly by the twenty first century teenager who, bombarded with advertising for the latest iphone or laptop, feels increasingly distant from the ‘real’ world of human interaction and support.

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