A reader writes:
It's become perfectly fashionable to bash The Catcher in the Rye, and if the familiar critiques have yet to become hackneyed, they're well on their way. Big yawns and rolling of the eyes, etc.
As with any other work of literature, not least the Old and New Testaments, Salinger's novel is a historical document that speaks with some clarity to the concerns of the time in which it was written. It's nigh impossible to comprehend the degree to which the imperative to conform pervaded in Holden Caulfield's upper-middle class, postwar America, but there's no lack of historical and literary testaments to it.
Context aside, Salinger speaks through Holden's voice to a universal truth about transition and permanence – the Natural History Museum is the same every time, but you've changed since the last time you were there.
Whether the author intended it thus or not (and my money is on the latter), it stands as a deft little trick of solipsism; every time you read Catcher, the printed words on the page come out the same as they always have, and Holden is still a 17-year-old prep school bustout telling his tale to a shrink in California – but you've changed.
Another supports that theory:
As a sophomore in high school, I had to read the book for English class and hated it. I found Holden to be a self-absorbed, self-pitying, whiny kid.
As a junior, I had to read the novel for English class a second time. I felt as though I was Saul knocked off of his donkey on the road to Damascus. I thought, "This may be the greatest novel ever written! How could I have been such a child when I read it before?"
Some years later, as a graduate student in English, I had to read the novel a third time, and I thought it was … okay. That's been my opinion for the last 30 years.
Another:
I'm in my 40s. My favorite Salinger book is now Franny and Zooey, for vaguely nostalgic reasons. Overall, I'd consider myself something of a literary snob – a would-be writer who reads primarily "writers' writers" – like Munro, Roth, McEwan. While I reread Franny and Zooey every few years, I've avoided Catcher in the Rye - maybe as I know it won't hold up to my 40-something literary taste. Maybe it's not timeless or the thing you can reread at 45.
But that doesn't lessen the power of reading it at 15 … the power of being recognized … of being reflected … even reading it 30 years after it was published. Sure it was indulgent, self-absorbed – in a word, adolescent. But it was the first time literature seemed to speak my language, seemed relevant. It made me feel like literature had something to do with me, my loneliness and feelings of alienation, and that such things weren't new to my generation, deep in the cynicism of the Cold War as I felt. It made me want to be a writer.
Perhaps it isn't the kind of thing you reread in your 40s, but I don't think that lessens the power of reading well-chosen adolescent novels during, well, adolescence. Part of literature's magic is in making the reader feel reflected, seen, understood – even during periods of life we would rather downplay.
I still consider it one of my favorite novels – for the power it had for me at 15.
The Dish 