Subversive charm

Book transcends generations, captivating teens for 50 years

Published: Monday, June 18, 2001

Ask high school students about John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," and you won't get much response.

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"Huckleberry Finn" doesn't ignite much of a fire either.

"The Old Man and the Sea"? Yawns.

But mention "Catcher in the Rye," and you've got their attention.

J.D. Salinger's iconoclastic novel -- it's marking its 50th anniversary this year, having been published by Little, Brown in July 1951 -- is still seducing high school- and college-age readers.

"My first question to students is, 'Does it talk to you?' and inevitably they say it does," says John Wenke, a professor of English at Salisbury State University in Salisbury, Md., and author of the 1991 book "J.D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction."

"Students buy into it because (protagonist) Holden Caulfield is irreverent, he's flip, he's funny, he doesn't like authority figures. They really love it."

"Catcher in the Rye" is the story of a troubled adolescent's isolation, frustration and confusion as he stands at the threshold of adulthood and tries to understand the human condition. It is told by Caulfield, in the first person, from a rest home where he is recovering from a mental breakdown.


English teacher Tim White of Benet Academy in Aurora, Ill., has been assigning Catcher in Rye for three decades, and the kids still love it.

The book covers a few days in his life, starting with his expulsion from prep school. He decides to spend a few days by himself in New York before returning to his parents' Manhattan home. As he wanders the city, he ponders his life and the approach of adulthood; thinks about his younger brother, who died of leukemia three years earlier, and his 10-year-old sister Phoebe, whom he loves; has adventures with an old girlfriend, a former classmate, a couple of thugs, a prostitute and a former teacher; and eventually finds his way to his parents' apartment.

Throughout, the reader senses the deter-ioration of Caulfield's mental state. ("I swear to God I'm a madman," he says at one point.) The book ends with Caulfield saying that he went home, was placed in the rest facility and plans to return to school the following September.

A couple of years ago, The Modern Library board ranked "Catcher in the Rye" No. 64 on its list of the 20th century's 100 best novels. It has been standard high school reading since the 1950s and is going strong today.

"Every high school kid identifies with it," says Tim White, who teaches English at Benet Acad-emy in Lisle, Ill., and who estimates he has taught "Catcher" about 80 times since the late '60s. "I thought it was good when I read it (in school) and wondered if kids would react to it the same way. And they have."

That's what sets "Catcher" apart. At times, Caulfield's narration may be dated -- his 1950s-era slang, for example -- but his thoughts and problems remain fresh and strike a chord with many young readers a half-century later.

"Every year I have a couple of kids who say it was like they were reading their life story; there's something really magical about that," says John O'Connor, who teaches "Catcher in the Rye" in his English classes at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.

"Unless you had a brother who died of leukemia when you were 13 years old, and unless you had this experience of being shipped from one boarding school to another, there should be profound differences. And yet the general feeling just really connects with people."

Amalia Smith, a junior at Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora, Ill., read the book on her own two years ago and recently reread it. She felt the connection with Caulfield.

"All the stuff I'd read before had been sugar-coated, but this I could relate to. Not to me per-sonally, but to friends I know," she says. "A lot of people are confused and don't know what is going on in their lives. I think all people go through that, and that's what makes the book so universal."

At the center of any discussion of "Catcher" is Caulfield, an appealing character to teen-agers who can identify with a 16-year-old trying to find his way in an adult world he'd rather not enter.

"Holden is, for me and a lot of other people my age, the first guy to have the courage to go out and do what we've all contemplat-ed during those excruci-ating moments in the mid-dle of math class -- just bolting," says Tim Miller, a senior at West Aurora High School in Aurora, Ill.

"Everyone loves that idea of just saying, 'Forget it -- I don't need this any-more,' and just leaving all the hectic and unnecessary elements of life behind."

He disrespects authority, says Josh Riddle, a junior at Naperville North High School in Naperville, Ill., explaining a big part of the character's appeal.

"He thinks older people are phonies -- teachers, parents," Riddle says. "And most of us, I think, can agree with that. We argue with our parents and people in authority because we think we're right."

One of the fascinating aspects of "Catcher" is the way Salinger made Caulfield such a riveting narrator. The readers are grabbed from the opening sentence:


The book "is conversational, and people feel immediate intimacy," Wenke says. "We're in the position of being the person in the armchair listening to Holden."

Wenke says Salinger spent years perfecting his main character, presenting him in various incarnations during the '40s in several pieces of short fiction.

"He was Curtis Caulfield in one story," Wenke says. "In another story ... he was a character named Billy. And he was killed off in a story about World War II."

Salinger was thus able to polish the character and find Caulfield's voice, one that still speaks to teen-agers.

"He worked over that voice so that it just seemed so authentic," Wenke says. "Salinger simply has the character perfect. Every phrase. (The language) seems natural, that he just put it on the page, but it's really not. It's the work of an artist. There's a very, very careful drafting of every word. I don't have any direct evidence, but I'm sure he worked that book over and over and over and over."

Interestingly, one thing that bothers some teen-agers is Caulfield's language. Much of his profanity -- and hardly a page goes by without a sprinkling -- is dated, so much so that it has lost the shock value it had in the '50s.

"A lot of kids say his language upsets them, that it's useless," White says.

Others go in the opposite direction.

"It's refreshing to read a book where the people talk like people," Miller says. "If anything, the language wasn't strong enough; it's much tamer than the language I hear on an hourly basis."

The book's profanity is one reason people have tried to censor "Catcher." O'Connor has investigated the reasons people want to ban the book and says he has found five factors that people objected to: Caulfield's lying, his drinking, the book's sexual scenes, profanity and the bad example Caulfield sets.

Others, though, see "Catcher in the Rye" as a lesson for young people, not only as literature but about life.

"There's wonderful stuff in 'Catcher in the Rye,' " says White, who is a deacon in the Catholic church, "wonderful, moral things. The Bible Belters who scream and don't want it taught have no concept of the morality in that book.

"When girls stay 'Stop,' he does. Look at his treatment of the prostitute. The decisions he makes, treating women like people and not like things, indicate this is a moral kid."

Wenke says he embraces the book, too.

"I would rank 'Catcher in the Rye' as one of the major novels of the 20th century," Wenke says, "not simply because of literary excellence, but because it does what great literature is supposed to do. It changes people's lives."

