If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the ‘Fuck you’ signs in the world. It’s impossible.
Rating: 2/5
Trigger Warnings: suicidal thoughts, depression
Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t read the book, this review will contain spoilers so it’s up to you if you continue…
I have this vague memory that an English teacher I loved told me that The Catcher in the Rye was her favourite book, and it’s a modern classic, so I could hardly not pick it up for £1 at the charity shop. It’s been on my TBR list for years. But you know my problem with classics? They tend to use a lot of words to say very little.
I really liked the narration; Holden was an energetic and entertaining first person narrator, and whilst stream of consciousness might not be anything new, this is the first time I can remember feeling so entirely inside someone’s head. He spoke to the reader, making it feel like a one-sided conversation, but he also just kept going - not in a bad way, but it meant I really felt like I was reading his thoughts as they came to him. There was always something going on for him to talk about, and which would keep you interested; the story might not have been particularly eventful, but Holden always found something to keep your attention.
Holden was also interesting as a character, not just a narrator. He was a teenage boy with a lot of contrary opinions, disliking almost everything he mentioned and then doing it anyway. He didn’t like the movies but went to see them, he didn’t like theatre but took a girl to see a show, he didn’t like people unless he’d been away from them for a while. I started to think maybe he was depressed; at points he spoke about dying, though more often he came up with momentary schemes of travelling out west and finding a job. He was an odd boy, a 16 year old who was at once naive and intelligent. He could see the worst of the world and keep going, but there was this sneaking suspicion in the back of my mind that the way he kept going as if nothing had happened was a result of disillusionment with the world he lived in - because from the looks of it, he had lived through some crap.
We never really got to know about these things though. Holden spoke of a boy dying at his school, of his brother the movie writer, his other brother who had died, perverted school teachers, a girl he wanted to call but kept putting off, and yet we didn’t hear about any of these things. Salinger created a character who clearly did have big life events in his past, but they were nowhere to be seen in the book. They were somewhere in the background, whilst we got to read about a boy spending three days in New York after being kicked out of school.
Enough things kept happening to keep me interested, but when I got to the end, I realised that meant very little. Just because Holden kept doing things, doesn’t mean anything really happened. I can’t even claim the ability to give you the major plot points because I’m not sure what would count - he leaves school and visits his sister? Three days in New York attending shows and museums sounds like it could make a really interesting story, but Holden was so disinterested in everything that it was his thoughts that kept me going, not the plot.
It was interesting whilst reading it, but I wouldn’t really recommend it or read it again…which is how I end up feeling about most classics to be honest.
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