Book Review: Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)

The teenage years can be a weird time for anybody.  Many stories seek to capture the feelings of loneliness, confusion, angst, depression, and restlessness that everybody feels in these uncertain phases of life.  The Catcher in the Rye stands as one of the best and most successful, because it captures all of this in one tight, punchy package, and the experience of reading it is quite the trip.

Through the narrative eyes of Holden Caulfield, the story can come off as totally random.  It's all about Holden's wanderings from Pencey Preparatory school to the streets of New York City, where he sees and experiences a number of things that continuously alienates him.  It's a pretty bizarre series of encounters, which includes a lot of horseplay, bar-hopping, and interactions with particularly seedy areas of the city.  It might seem like a weird, plotless mess, but the characters and themes keep it all glued together as a cohesive plot:  this is not so much about "plot" as it is about Holden reflecting, and ultimately discovering, his own place in the world.  Through all the flashbacks and all the people he meets, he eventually finds something that inspires happiness in a world full of "phonies." The journey to discover what it means to be the "catcher in the rye" is what this story is all about.

Even though the book covers a lot of ground between covering Holden's past, present, and future, it is a short and incredibly characteristic.  The whole thing is written in a very casual style, using Holden's voice and all his mannerisms and colloquialisms to place the reader in his shoes and make us understand all his thoughts and feelings on an intuitive level.  Because of this, the book is not only consistently entertaining, it's also highly immersive and it succeeds at eliciting sympathy for the character.  It's just as evocative as it is easy to read.

In spite of everything, JD Salinger's prose is quite brilliant in its own ways.  He makes great use of language - the best and worst of it - to bring the character and story to life, and to make sure we can follow it to its end.  The book entails some intriguing metaphors (especially in its title).  Dialogue seems quite authentic.  The language overall can be rather uncompromising, especially in the liberal way it uses curse words, but it fits the character and story pretty aptly.

The Catcher in the Rye is an interesting, bittersweet classic full of character and themes that are worth reading.  It deserves to be read at least once.

4.5/5