This review will contain spoilers, so if you want to avoid knowing all the details of the sparse and meaningless plot, maybe skip the first couple of paragraphs.
Holden Caulfield is a self-important, spoiled and worthless little shit. At the start of the book, he is cooling his heels at the fourth boarding school he’s been expelled from because he just can’t be bothered to even try to apply himself (having failed four out of five subjects completely), and generally bitching about how phony his room mate, dorm mates and teachers are. Holden, ever heard of the pot calling the kettle black? You are that pot. Not content to waste his the money his parents spent on tuition, he also manages to lose all the fencing equipment belonging to the school before he’s expelled. because apparently reading a subway map and keeping track of bags of equipment at the same time overloads the fragile little mind of special disenfranchised snowflake Holden.
Having spent a while internally bitching about some of his school friends and being jealous of their luck with the ladies, he picks a fight with his room mate and decides to leave school early, before his parents are alerted to his most recent failure. His grandmother is apparently overly generous, so he has cash to spare and goes by train to New York, where he books himself into a rather sleazy hotel. Here he proceeds to ruminate about girls he’s known but never managed to hook up with (probably because they can tell a mile away that Holden is an emo narcissist with an inflated sense of his own self-worth and no apparent sense of humour) and gets beaten up by a pimp after paying a prostitute NOT to have sex with him. He also goes out drinking and hemorrhaging money all over the place. After a couple of days, when he’s nearly broke, he goes home to see his little sister. Then he visits an old teacher who seems to have escaped Holden’s go to judgement of being too phony, but said teacher may or may not make a pass at him, so Holden flees into the night. He then has some sort of mental breakdown and ends up in an institution, from whence he tells the entire story of the book.
As is hopefully clear from my rating of this book, I absolutely loathed this so-called piece of classic literature. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better example of the fact that it’s not always the worthy texts that survive to become classics. I honestly have no idea how this book is lauded as a great novel or why it speaks to people even today. Holden is absolutely insufferable. He’s a whiny, snivelling, spoiled and clueless little brat, who seems to think he is better than everyone around him, adults as well as kids his own age. The only hardship he’s ever experienced is the death of his younger brother, apart from that, he’s lived a life of ease and privilege and is determined to throw everything he is given away, because growing up is just so, you know, boring.
Not only is Holden absolutely insufferable, and very high on my list of fictional characters I want to knee in the groin and punch in the face (Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights is probably still number one, closely followed by Cathy from that same book). He doesn’t appear to undergo any sort of significant development over the course of the book. He starts out a horrible waste of oxygen, and ends the book the same way. The only nice thing I can find to say about him is that he loves his little sister Phoebe, who is about as great a character as Holden is awful.
I seriously, for real, do not understand what is supposed to be so great about this book. What purpose does it serve? Nothing of consequence happens. Holden is atrocious and likes to ramble on about nothing, thinking back to previous events in his life that are also fairly insignificant and amounted to very little. Like so many other teens, he feels alienated from his surroundings and doesn’t fit in. Not that he does a thing to change that or to find some sort of purpose. All he does is complain and sulk, and I wanted to slap him so hard his teeth rattled. My colleagues in the English department have decided that all the higher level kids are to read this book when we’re embarking on our current topic of Classics, and I just desperately hope that it reads better to teenagers than it did to me. As several of my colleagues seemed rather appalled at my vehement hate for the book, it can be their job to defend its worthiness on the curriculum. None have so far been able to explain in a satisfying way to me why this book deserves to still be read in schools or by anyone, anywhere. Sorry, Mr Salinger, your book is bad and if you weren’t dead, you should feel bad. The only upside for me as a teacher that I can think of is that the kids reading the book won’t be able to find a movie adaptation they can watch to cheat and thus escape the reading.
I can now tick this book off the list of “books to read before you die”. I found it even more pointless and hard going than The Great Gatsby and Anna Karenina (though at least, like Gatsby, it’s a blessedly short book, not a massive brick like Anna), but don’t loathe it with every fiber of my being like I do Wuthering Heights and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Although with all those books, I at least see what they bring to literature. This book – nothing. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the lowest rated book I read this year, so at least I got that out of the way early.
You and I should be literary best friends. Thanks for saying something I’ve never felt the courage to say about Catcher in the Rye. (Also Tess and Wuthering Heights).
I will happily clasp in friendship anyone who feels as I do about The Catcher in the Rye. We shall be bosom friends, I’m sure (I’m currently listening to Anne of Green Gables in audio, it’s influencing my language choices at present).
My hatred of this book knows no bounds. I had to read it in high school and to this day automatically dislike anyone who ever remotely tries to defend. Also I’m there with you on gatsby and Anna as well. Both are absolutely insufferable.
I’ve not attempted Anna, but I LOATHE both Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. Even the movie adaptations! Hello book family! (I’m sorry bonnie!)
As Ale to what Ale said below ” I can’t help but think that maybe the whole point is we get to hear a story from the POV from an insufferable, wealthy, teenage shit. Holden would be the awful side-character in most other novels, but Salinger went and decided ‘hey, what would it be like if I gave that guy a voice?'” I’m not even buying that. I can’t think of another book of the top of my head that has the same prick-as narrator level as Holden, but there has to be a better one if that’s the bar we’re going to use.
Now I have heard from readers I love that this book absolutely has to be read at the right time to be enjoyed, and obviously that’s a narrow and movable window. bonnie says below that “And shitty teenager Holden Caulfield said all the nasty things I felt but was too ashamed to express. The Catcher in the Rye was resonant for me, because it was cathartic.” And maybe the catharsis was what I was missing when I read this in high school I was already dealing with adulting by that time and all I could do was think how terrible Holden was at living life, and how little we had in common. But perhaps I was already just past him, and there was no window for this for me.
You know, I loved this book when I was a teenager, but I think I loved it because I, too, was an insufferable little shit. Your take on Holden is 100% correct. Adults who still wax poetic about this book should be looked at askance.
I think it’s a requirement of all teenagers to be insufferable little shits at one point or another. I know I certainly was…
Thank you all. I’m glad I’m not the only one who hated this book. I’m entirely serious, I have no idea why this is still being read today, and hasn’t been left to be quietly forgotten. I may not have liked some of the other classics I mention, but I at least see what the authors tried to do and why they may be interesting to analyse. This – nope. World of nope.
Woo! I hated this book SO MUCH when I was forced to read it in school.
You’re so angry in this review. I love it.
I hate this book with the heat of a thousand suns. When I got to the last page I wanted the universe to give me the last 200 pages of my life back, because I could’ve been reading the “Wheel of Time” instead, dammit!
Although, after reading your review (and this is probably the stupid MFA talking), I can’t help but think that maybe the whole point is we get to hear a story from the POV from an insufferable, wealthy, teenage shit. Holden would be the awful side-character in most other novels, but Salinger went and decided “hey, what would it be like if I gave that guy a voice?”
It’s shit as far as I’m concerned, but I guess someone out there thought it was a good idea to keep that narrative voice around.
I’m also convinced there as very little editing in Salinger’s time-period. I think they just handed books into publishing houses and people printed that crap.
I really connected with this book in college, because I’d really stumbled through my adolescence and couldn’t quite explain why I felt angry or depressed or lonely or insecure. And shitty teenager Holden Caulfield said all the nasty things I felt but was too ashamed to express. The Catcher in the Rye was resonant for me, because it was cathartic. There’s just no better way to explain the impact the book had on me and still resonates with me to this day. I agree that yes, Holden Caulfield is indeed a shitty person, but I would argue that Salinger is making a point with him. Catcher is definitely one of the most polarizing classics, though. I don’t know anyone who is indifferent to it–they either love it or hate it.
Sidenote: I shamelessly love The Great Gatsby and will defend it to my dying day. The prose is incredible, and there’s something delicious and awful about the despair of some truly despicable people.
I’m indifferent to it! You know me! Ha.
Well played.
I was insufferable in a very different way as a teenager. I was far too introverted and pretty much buried myself in my books, to the point of rudeness, but I was absolutely nothing like Holden. The occasional student that I have who is like him, is the one who tends to really get on my nerves. Kids who have absolutely everything served to them on a platter, yet can’t do anything but whine about their first world problems.
I can definitely see that. The university at which I’m currently employed enrolls a lot of rich white kids who all walk around in expensive yoga pants and have Beats by Dre headphones hanging around their collective necks. The college is at an intersection of three very segregated ethnic neighborhoods, and we have a lot of petty crime surrounding the campus. I used to get a lot of “I feel good about myself for serving food at a soup kitchen once!” papers, as well as complaints about how hard it was to be white in Obama’s America, until I began changing my pedagogy to pull them off-guard. It’s definitely frustrating to get those entitled and blind-to-their-own-privilege kids in a class, especially when they claim hardship.
Try instead “King Dork” by Frank Portman.
Ooh, let’s start a club! I tried to read this for my book club and just couldn’t do it. I hated Holden with a passion. I may have quit while he was still at the boarding school, or soon after. I hate not finishing a book, but sometimes I can’t help it. I’m indifferent to Gatsby, and I thought Wuthering Heights was entirely too long.
Like others have said, this book can be good if you read it at exactly the right time-during the teenage, righteous little shit days. If an adult tells you this is their favorite book it means they either:
a) are an asshole.
b) haven’t picked up a book since this was assigned to them in high school.
I didn’t realize that growing up with rich parents meant you weren’t allowed to suffer from depression or be sad about your brother dying.
Yeah, Holden Caulfield isn’t a great person. He’s selfish and self-obsessed and very annoying at times. in other words, he’s a teenager.
Being that privileged means that you should probably be a bit more self-aware of how good you have it, despite everything else. A lot of people, teens or not, have been in much worse straits than Holden, both physically and mentally and do their best to just get on with life, instead of just being insufferable, spoiled and thankless little shits, like Holden is here. I’m not saying that rich kids don’t suffer from depression and have dead siblings, but they are still vastly better off than poor kids (or people of any age) in the same situation. At least Holden’s parents can afford to get him help – he might have wanted to express some smidge of gratitude towards them instead of just whining about how phony everyone around him is.
I think being privileged often means you are less aware of how good you have it, especially when you’re a teenager. This is in no way a defense of Holden or the book which I luckily missed out on in school and have absolutely no desire to read as an adult. I did enjoy John Green’s analysis of the book on CrashCourse’s youtube channel though.
This, definitely. I went to a private HS in Los Angeles where as a student on financial aid, I was one of the “underprivileged” students. An astonishing fact that is laughable now given time, perspective, and exposure to life outside of that bubble, and I can recognize my very privileged upbringing for what it was. At the time, though, my worldview was WARPED and I had no problem vocalizing my hilariously ignorant opinions. It happens, especially to teens who just haven’t been exposed to anything different.
I teach teenagers, all of them a lot less privileged than Holden. You’d be surprised how few of them are as completely full of themselves as he is. They’re self-centred hormone bombs who frequently want to do the exact opposite of what a grown-up tells them to, but they’re not the complete waste of breath and space that Holden is. Several of them do indeed deal with depression every day, either because they themselves suffer from it or have family members who are afflicted. Being depressed or being a teenager doesn’t excuse you from trying to achieve something, anything at all. Why yes, I do feel strongly about this.
I agree that you have to come to this book at the right time in your life. I loved it in high school and reread it once or twice in college. I still bring it with me after five or six moves because it holds such sentimental value, but it’s not something I’m dying to read again as a full-fledged adult.
It’s been well over a decade since I’ve picked this up, but isn’t Holden in mourning for his brother (Allie?)? And he’s sort of spinning out of control, not sure what to make of the world or who he wants to be? He idolizes his younger sister and wishes he could be that uncomplicated and loveable. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it since it’s been so long. Anyway, I don’t think the protagonist needs to be likeable to make a book worthwhile. A lot of people aren’t at their best when they’re teenagers. That part feels real to me.
I think because I read Ordinary People at a similar time and that book explored the grief and depression over the death of an older sibling, parents who were trying but also slightly checked out because of their own grief, and a typical teenager so much better I had no patience for the way Salinger attacks his narrative. So, I guess I’m saying try Ordinary People if you want to read a book about a relatively privileged depressed teenager coping with the death of a sibling, not Catcher in the Rye.