A reader writes:
Regarding the reactions to Catcher in the Rye, I read it for the first time at the age of 40 and loved it. I thought it was a cruelly funny and spot-on portrait of whiny, self-absorbed, vaguely creepy teenagers. Caulfield's lack of self-awareness is beautifully rendered. There's an unforgettable scene where he's clearly bouncing off the walls in an anxious, jealous rage and he's totally unaware of it, reporting his mental state as merely "nervous." He soon physically attacks the boy that's inspiring his jealousy, and has no idea why he's doing it. It rang true for me. That whole element of being in the middle of a temper tantrum while thinking that you're in control, with no understanding of the forces that are pushing you around, the sullen confusion, the desperate half-formed ambitions, that's what being a teenager is, or was to me anyway.
I was shocked to learn that everyone else saw Caulfield as some kind of hero.
Like Humbert Humbert you're supposed to understand him, and see the world through his eyes, and be a little bit horrified afterwards, but you're not supposed to perceive him as a hero. Am I the only reader who was genuinely afraid that he was going to deliberately do some kind of physical or grave emotional harm to his sweet, adoring little sister there at the end? Is this mostly just a function of the age at which you're first exposed to the novel? Since everyone except me read it in high school, were they just blind to the fact that Caulfield is a jackass in a typically teenager way?
Another writes:
I use to hate Holden for the same reason Perrotta and Rosen point to: annoying, whiny, self-pitying. But over time I began to feel sympathetic for the boy who never had a chance to mourn the death of his little brother, who never felt like he could genuinely express himself, who acted phony nine times out of ten but projected his anger at himself onto the world around him. The real kicker is that in high school, the semester after reading Catcher in the Rye, we were assigned to read Perrotta's Bad Haircut.
What surprises me most about Perrotta's statement – besides the lack of empathy for a kid in crisis as he attempts to hold onto anything around him and protect his sister from the pain he feels – is how similar Perrotta's main character in Bad Haircut is to Holden. Buddy, like Holden, is an observer to the world as opposed to an active participant ("You're a spectator. You're happy to stand around and watch," Buddy's coach says). Both Holden and Buddy are writers. Both act out violently (Buddy out of peer pressure, Holden out of grief/frustration). Both just want to fit in.
Holden is just so buried underneath his own grief he can't bear to put on the masks that society asks us to wear when we are grieving and are still forced to interact with people. Both blow things way out of proportion (as is appropriate for a novel from the perspective of a teenager). Both are disappointed by their earliest sexual exploits. Both feel alone. Both see adults for the flawed beings they are. We only see Holden really in December 1949, whereas Buddy grows throughout the '70s. Both are quintessentially teenage boys, but beyond their gender, they are on that cusp of young adulthood and have to grapple with the cards life has dealt to them.
So as someone who has written a book from the teenage boy's perspective, and clearly demonstrated his ability to treat the intricacies of that age group's mentality without undo nostalgia or over-dramatization, I'm a little shocked Perrotta doesn't admire Salinger for having created one of the most memorable teenage voices in all of American literary history.
The Dish 