We all love “The Catcher in the Rye,” and we all hate it.

June 18, 2024 1:01 PM

Christ may be able to live on cheeseburgers and Cokes, but Salinger wanted something more. This is his power and his downfall—his vampiric need to drain the potential of the young. Whether through his bohemian characters or the very real women in his own life, he was always ready to give a lecture and take power. Cute as Salinger’s characters are, they live under his thumb. They’re playthings, like dolls. We enjoy judging their powerlessness, but his fetish for purity was often what he tried to use to get off the hook for his ghoulish behavior. Marrying young women until they were no longer ingenues, feeding on the genre of YA as a source for so-called serious literary fiction, devouring Eastern prayers without regard for their context or specificity. YA is his Trojan horse. This is a grim realization. from Hagiography of a Narcissist: On J. D. Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1924” by Grace Byron [LARB; ungated]
posted by chavenet (23 comments total)

I read that essay as I always read essays about Salinger, in hopes of finally being able to empathize with, or at worst grasp in a detached and abstract way, the unbreakable hold Salinger often gets on writers whose work I admire and other people I like and respect.

But it didn’t happen.
posted by jamjam at 1:40 PM on June 18 [12 favorites]

I don't understand this. Salinger's last published work was in, like, the mid-1960s, wasn't it? I'm not even sure we can say the "YA" genre fully existed at that time, though novels were being written that would come to be identified as the pioneers of the genre. It feels like this essay may have been written by someone not conscious that the genre has a history?
posted by praemunire at 1:41 PM on June 18 [12 favorites]

Dostoevsky remains in rotation for literary fuckboys everywhere. seriously?
“while truly digging around today for some papers I never found, I rediscovered René Girard‘s 2002 review of Joe’s biography, in an article called 'Dostoevsky’s Demons.' Apparently, he thinks Fyodor may have been a rather sexy fellow.” [stanford]
*closes browser, picks up Dostoevsky*
posted by HearHere at 1:49 PM on June 18 [5 favorites]

I went through a Salinger phase but Hapworth 16, 1924 was a slog. As a kid who was an asynchronous learner and who was trotted out to perform intellectual amusements up until puberty (good news, it mostly wears off except on the Internet), the Glass family dynamics were actually interesting, especially the shadow of the It’s a Wise Child show over their lives. I sometimes think of the Glass family when reading about influencers. In some ways I think Salinger himself heralded influencer culture, right down to the eastern mysticism appropriation.

(OMG now I’m thinking of Seth Rogan and Hemingway as similar types.)

feeding on the genre of YA as a source for so-called serious literary fiction

I have to say this line was really confusing. What YA was he feeding on, Caddie Woodlawn? Seventeenth Summer?
posted by warriorqueen at 2:38 PM on June 18 [9 favorites]

With the framing personal reminiscence and the mix of registers, as a retrospective on a Famous Male Writer, I wanted this to be like Patricia Lockwood on Wallace or Updike (both definitely previously on MeFi) but it’s not that - too much that’s not as incisive as it presumably was meant to be, too much (like “literary fuckboys”) that’s just cliché.
posted by atoxyl at 2:40 PM on June 18 [3 favorites]

I'm trying to remember if I ever actually read "Catcher". It feels like it might have been assigned in high school english class but it also feels like everything I know about it is second-hand. If I had to read it in high school then it has completely vanished into the grey pit of depression that swallowed most of my high school years.

I dunno who the "we" in the "we all love Catcher in the Rye, and we all hate it" is supposed to include, but it sure doesn't include me.
posted by egypturnash at 2:41 PM on June 18 [6 favorites]

This makes me want to watch "Hollywoo Stars and Celebrities: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things?? Let's Find Out!"
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:41 PM on June 18 [17 favorites]

I dunno who the "we" in the "we all love Catcher in the Rye, and we all hate it" is supposed to include, but it sure doesn't include me.

There is certainly a generational aspect to who really imprinted on Catcher in the Rye. Like, it was a work of the 40s which was novelized in the 50s, and was regarded as highly subversive by authority figures when the Baby Boomers and early Gen X were coming of age, and it became a totemic symbol for countercultural youth (specifically white youth, because for all his outsider energy, Salinger really did not speak to or about the concerns of ethnic minorities) of those cohorts. But by the mid-80s, those people who had imprinted on Catcher had become the middle-aged boring folks teenagers disrespect, and putting this fusty relic of their own rebellious phase onto high-school reading lists had a real "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?" energy which failed to impress their young charges. So there is definitely a dividing point between those who were deeply impressed by its rebellious cool and those who saw it as their teachers' vain attempt to indicate that they, too, had once been rebelliously cool.
posted by jackbishop at 2:55 PM on June 18 [27 favorites]

...regarded as highly subversive by authority figures when the Baby Boomers and early Gen X were coming of age...but by the mid-80s, those people who had imprinted on Catcher had become the middle-aged boring folks teenagers disrespect.

By the mid-80s, the earliest Gen Xers were around 20 years old...many more "early Gen X" were teenagers.
posted by senor biggles at 3:11 PM on June 18 [5 favorites]

I'm not even sure we can say the "YA" genre fully existed at that time, though novels were being written that would come to be identified as the pioneers of the genre. It feels like this essay may have been written by someone not conscious that the genre has a history?

I really want Molly of Lost Classics of Teen Lit to do a post about a Salinger book now.
posted by May Kasahara at 3:18 PM on June 18 [4 favorites]

This is the kind of essay that leads me to wonder if editors still exist.

He can entertain this pessimism because, as a white male, he has free time.

Holden Caulfield has free time because he's in a mental hospital; also, as a brown girl, I used to have a lot of time for pessimism and books that were above my grade level. (I still do, but I used to, too.)

I think the connection between Salinger's life and work could be a good topic for an essay, but this feels like a superficial muddle.

Sidenote: ctrl-R Seymour --> Young Sheldon, the bow tie vibes are real
posted by betweenthebars at 4:42 PM on June 18 [21 favorites]

Ah I love that book. The way he just [clenches fist] catches all that frickin rye.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:04 PM on June 18 [15 favorites]

I liked this piece even as its ersatz intimacy made me groan. I'm talking about the coolly presumptuous shorthand signaling: white men with their free time, am I right? DFW OMG! What is up with those Marxist fuckboys?

It's like touring cultural touchstones with a guide who does nothing but sneer at them. Indeed it oozes a desire to crush and dismiss that's not unlike the attitude that's being critiqued! But as a bit of self reckoning via projection it does singe some cows.
posted by dmh at 5:41 PM on June 18 [8 favorites]

I have noticed that when some contemporary critics write about books and other works from the mid-twentieth century, they seem totally unaware of what other books were like when that book appeared , and the impression it made on its readers at that time. So they are unable to recognize what was innovative about it and unable to understand what made it popular.

The giveaway here is this critic's remark about "feeding on YA as a source for literary fiction." There was no YA genre as we understand it in 1948 when Catcher appeared. Salinger created some of the tropes of the YA genre -- I might argue that Catcher was the first modern YA book. That's why the book became so popular and influential, I believe --- based on my own experience:

I first read Catcher in 1964 when I was 13. Someone (not me) asked our eighth grade teacher about it. He said, "It's not recommended for readers your age. It's not really pornographic ..." So I went home and found the copy I remmbered seeing on my parent's' shelves. It was the crumbling pocket book edition from 1948 with the garish cover painting of Holden in his red baseball cap turned backward, wandering the streets of New York. It looked like sensational pulp fiction -- there was no such genre as "literary fiction" in those days either.

I found it was the story of a troubled high school kid, told in his own words. I had never read anything like it -- and I was an avid, prolific reader. I don't recall that I "loved" it, but I did find it gripping and read it right through.

So it was quite innovative and unique for its time. I think what Salinger did was remarkable. He wrote a story about a (presumably) wealthy prep school kid, for a rather highbrow New Yorker style audience. It became hugely well-known and popular among a large audience who, it might seem, had little in common with the character or its intended readership. How did he bring that off?
posted by JonJacky at 5:54 PM on June 18 [33 favorites]

I checked out at "ennui is a rich person's game." Bullshit. Rich people can always do something cool. Cool things cost money. You know who knows a lot about sitting around feeling sorry for themselves? Poor people! Because that shit is free.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:53 PM on June 18 [16 favorites]

Yes on the generational differences. The conformist stereotype of the '50s is overstated but basically accurate. My father was in high school and college then and was a big fan of Salinger and Kerouac. I read On the Road at that age and found it boring. "It's just some guys wondering the country on road trip, with no clear purpose." "Which was exactly why it was considered so radical when it came out," he explained. It inspired him to hitchhike across the country - something else hat was radical in the '50s but cliche a few decades later.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:45 PM on June 18 [8 favorites]

When did Robert Cormier's books get notoriety? I feel like that would be the touchstone of YA lit.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:24 PM on June 18 [3 favorites]

I hated the book completely and without reservation when I read it in 1995 at age 11, and again at 15. As a west coast kid, I found Caulfield completely alien. Assigning it to high school students today is baffling.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 9:43 PM on June 18 [10 favorites]

What with this being the first "unreliable narrative" book I was ever assigned, (that I can recall), and the "phonies" being the in-crowd trendy hipster types, and pushback against authority in general, I can still see why it would be assigned reading.
posted by Windopaene at 10:49 PM on June 18 [3 favorites]

Robert Cormier's best known books The Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese were published in 1974 and 1977. About the same time were Judy Blume's Are You There God... (1970) and Forever (1975). Also S E Hinton's The Outsiders (1967) and Rumble Fish (1975). According to Wikipedia, "Hinton is credited with introducing the YA genre." Not sure about that, but it looks like what people now think of as the YA genre emerged around 1970, a generation after Catcher.

BUT I distinctly remember sections in libraries labelled "Young Adult" through the 1960s.
But the books were different - in those days, the Young Adult books were classics with young protagonists, like Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island, or genre books like Robert Heinlein's Have Space Suit, Will Travel.

In contrast to those, the modern YA genre features young people in the present, in familiar locales, dealing with contemporary problems, narrated in their own language - often inarticulate and profane. Catcher hit all those points in 1948. Was it really the only modern YA novel for 20 years? That seems unlikely, but would explain its popularity and influence.
posted by JonJacky at 10:58 PM on June 18 [7 favorites]

Mod note: One comment removed. Please remember the Guidelines and be considerate and respectful when posting comments. Starting off a thread to solely complain about the length of an article is not that.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 4:37 AM on June 19 [1 favorite]

idk i loved this. pretty much encapsulates everything that rubbed me the wrong way about his writing, and the reminder of what a predatory scumbag he was irl was a breath of fresh air
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:15 AM on June 19 [1 favorite]

I distinctly remember sections in libraries labelled "Young Adult" through the 1960s.
But the books were different - in those days, the Young Adult books were classics with young protagonists, like Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island, or genre books like Robert Heinlein's Have Space Suit, Will Travel.In contrast to those, the modern YA genre features young people in the present, in familiar locales, dealing with contemporary problems, narrated in their own language - often inarticulate and profane. Catcher hit all those points in 1948. Was it really the only modern YA novel for 20 years? That seems unlikely, but would explain its popularity and influence.
posted by JonJacky

Brilliant comment, JonJacky.

And the opening par of Catcher needs repeating: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.


Salinger was, evidently, keenly aware he was a genre-buster in (nascent) YA fiction at the time of Catcher's composition. I'm a boomer, I first read Catcher in the 1970s. I was eleven years old when our much-loved dad was killed in a car accident in 1971(he was on his own in the car). I understood to my marrow the angry dislocation of the Salinger-Caulfield voice - even if many of the cultural references were a mystery to me, as a non-American.

I've since learned Salinger was a weird shit. But if you were an inarticulate, ragingly unhappy 11-year-old bookworm at the start of the 1970s, The Catcher in the Rye was an amazing comfort.

(I hope this is not too personal. I am startled at the emotion it still stirs.)
posted by Jody Tresidder at 11:14 AM on June 19 [12 favorites]