Written by J.D. Salinger – Published in 1951 – 192 Pages
Mrs. MacDonald was a swell teacher, she really was. Usually, when teachers put on like they’re your friend they turn on a dime and flunk you because you didn’t write some crummy composition for them. But this Mrs. MacDonald was alright though because she wasn’t a phony at all. You still felt like you could give her a buzz after class and chew the rag about Hitchcock or Heaney or whatever and she wouldn’t get on your damn case about some composition you didn’t hand in.
Anyway, where I want to start telling is when I was given this lousy book in MacDonald’s class. It’s by this old American named J.D. Salinger. He was in some terrific battles in World War II and saw heavy fighting which I thought was exciting as hell. I figured this book would have loads of action but it’s instead about this mopey kid who wanders around New York for a couple of days after he’s kicked out of prep school. There are no tanks and no one even gets shot. God, it killed me.
My flatmate read the book before I did. I didn’t actually read it in high school and flunked the essay but I still have the book and it’s lousy with stamps that say “Property of Cashmere H.S. English Department – Please Return” which gives me a real buzz.
Anyway, my flatmate reads this goddamn book and tells me that it’s alright so I pick it up to see if it’s as sexy as he says it is and all I get is this mopey kid. No guns or anything close to World War II. I mean Jesus Christ.
This guy, Holden Caulfied, is a helluva basket case. He mopes around New York in 1946 with his pockets overflowing with dough. He pays for rounds of drinks in vomity hotel bars for people he hates. He pays a prostitute to just talk to him and gets squirmy when she takes off her dress. You wouldn’t believe it. A goddamn basket case.
So what kills me is that even though you’re with this kid for 192 crummy pages you’re not really in his head. The prince guards his soul like it held the original eleven herbs and spices, I’m not kidding.
Caulfield constantly uses the passive voice. It kills me. Mrs. MacDonald would always get on me about this. She says it creates distance between text and reader but Salinger uses it loads and he’s supposed to be one of the best writers of all time or something. Then he says ‘sort of’ like a sonofabitch – 179 times, I counted. Talk about insincere.
Anyway, this kid is blue as hell about the ducks in central park and goes on about where they go in winter to every broad and cab driver he meets. 8 goddamn pages about these ducks, you’d think they cured cancer.
Turns out, Caulfield’s kid brother died of Leukemia and he bloodied his fist by breaking all these windows because he was so damn sore about it. He sort of blows it off in the first few pages. He tells you about his kid brother and how he wrote all these poems in green pen on a baseball mitt before saying, “he’s dead now.” That’s it. 8 pages about goddamn ducks and that’s it. That killed me, it really did. If you spent 3 days in my head after my kid brother had died of leukemia last fall you’d hear a helluva lot more about it.
After a while, I got the feeling this guy was yellow as hell. It reminded me that he’s just a kid scared of all these inevitabilities: adulthood; responsibility; accepting his brother’s gone. Most of all, old Caulfield’s afraid of time. He goes on about how he loves the Natural History Museum because everything there stays where it is. He could go a hundred thousand times and nobody’d move. This is the only time before the novel’s end where I saw his heart get even remotely close to his sleeve.
See, Caulfield sees time as this straight line that leads towards all those inevitabilities that I told you about. They’re waiting for him like a pack of hungry lions and he wants to make sure nothing changes so they don’t eat him for lunch. Anyway, this kid’s swimming against an unstoppable tide and spending all his dough and sure enough he begins to drown. That’s where things get sort of depressing.
I’ve given this book a helluva lot of grief but you should really read it. You’ve probably been made to read it in High School already but you should pick it up again. Books lose their magic when you have to read them for some lousy module.
One thing that’s so sexy about this story, aside from the writing which is sexy as hell, is even though Caulfield lives in a world that’s long been dead, he talks about feelings I recognize but haven’t yet been able to articulate. He goes green when he thinks of time as this line towards painful inevitabilities and to tell you the truth that always makes me squirm too.
At the end of the book, he sees this little kid on a carousel and starts to get better. He realises that there’s no point in rebelling against the tide. He sort of decides to live humbly for a cause and begins to feel alright about things and then I’m reading this and I start feeling alright about things. It was nice, sort of.
Anyway, God this Caulfield is full of angst. Despite being loaded and all he can’t afford the one thing he needs because Prozac won’t be invented until 1972. The list of things this kid hates is stupid long – the movies, school, phonies, guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers in a handshake. That killed me, it really did. He also hates vests and abrupt endings.
Favourite Lines
“I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.”
“I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”