Mrs. MacDonald was a swell teacher, she really was. Usually, when teachers put on like they\u2019re your friend they turn on a dime and flunk you because you didn\u2019t write some crummy composition for them. But this Mrs. MacDonald was alright though because she wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t get on your damn case about some composition you didn\u2019t hand in.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, where I want to start telling is when I was given this lousy book in MacDonald\u2019s class. It\u2019s 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\u2019s instead about this mopey kid who wanders around New York for a couple of days after he\u2019s kicked out of prep school. There are no tanks and no one even gets shot. God, it killed me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My flatmate read the book before I did. I didn\u2019t actually read it in high school and flunked the essay but I still have the book and it\u2019s lousy with stamps that say \u201cProperty of Cashmere H.S. English Department – Please Return\u201d which gives me a real buzz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, my flatmate reads this goddamn book and tells me that it\u2019s alright so I pick it up to see if it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 <\/em>to him and gets squirmy when she takes off her dress. You wouldn\u2019t believe it. A goddamn basket case. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So what kills me is that even though you\u2019re with this kid for 192 crummy pages you\u2019re not really <\/em>in his head. The prince guards his soul like it held the original eleven herbs and spices, I\u2019m not kidding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Caulfield constantly<\/em> 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\u2019s supposed to be one of the best writers of all time or something. Then he says \u2018sort of\u2019 like a sonofabitch – 179 times, I counted. Talk about insincere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019d think they cured cancer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Turns out, Caulfield\u2019s kid brother died <\/em>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, \u201che\u2019s dead now.\u201d That\u2019s it. 8 pages about goddamn ducks and that\u2019s 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\u2019d hear a helluva lot more about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After a while, I got the feeling this guy was yellow as hell. It reminded me that he\u2019s just a kid scared of all these inevitabilities: adulthood; responsibility; accepting his brother\u2019s 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\u2019d move. This is the only time before the novel\u2019s end where I saw his heart get even remotely<\/em> close to his sleeve. <\/p>\n\n\n\n See, Caulfield sees time as this straight line that leads towards all those inevitabilities that I told you about. They\u2019re waiting for him like a pack of hungry lions and he wants to make sure nothing changes so they don\u2019t eat him for lunch. Anyway, this kid\u2019s swimming against an unstoppable tide and spending all his dough and sure enough he begins to drown. That\u2019s where things get sort of depressing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve given this book a helluva lot of grief but you should really read it. You\u2019ve probably been made to read it in High School already but you should pick it up again. Books lose their magic when you have <\/em>to read them for some lousy module. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing that\u2019s so sexy about this story, aside from the writing which is sexy as hell, is even though Caulfield lives in a world that\u2019s long been dead, he talks about feelings I recognize but haven\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of the book, he sees this little kid on a carousel and starts to get better. He realises that there\u2019s 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\u2019m reading this and I start feeling alright about things. It was nice<\/em>, sort of. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, God<\/em> this Caulfield is full of angst. Despite being loaded and all he can\u2019t afford the one thing he needs because Prozac won\u2019t be invented until 1972. The list of things this kid hates is stupid long – the movies, school, phonies, <\/em>guys that think they\u2019re being a pansy if they don\u2019t break around forty of your fingers in a handshake. That killed me, it really did. He also hates vests and abrupt endings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Favourite Lines <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 4-minute read. My flatmate reads this goddamn book and tells me that it\u2019s alright so I pick it up to see if it\u2019s as sexy as he says it is and all I get is this mopey kid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,13,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3","category-ray","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":531,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions\/531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}