WTF "Catcher In The Rye"

I read CITR in high school like everybody else, was unimpressed but kept my copy. A few years ago, when pruning (radically) my library at Mrs. Noco's insistence ("Are you ever going to read that again?") I tossed my copy into the recycle-to-Half-Price-Books bin.

Tonight I started reading "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes which has been praised to the heavens (even won the Booker) but halfway thru it I decided I needed to look at "Catcher" again -- the similarities are glaring. Alas I don't have it anymore. Amazon's prices are higher than I wanted. So i wondered if Apple iBooks would have it as a free download, like they do many literary classics.

No such luck. They want $28.99. FOR A FUCKING DOWNLOAD.

Salinger's heirs must be greedy little twits. I mean, that's their only source of income, right?

No wait. It was "A Separate Peace" by John Knowles that presaged this novel. My mistake. Memory fails.

And hey, I kept my copy of ASP. It's a much better book.

I finished TSOAE last night -- it's a short book, and recommended you read it in one sitting.

Part One was quite good, although extremely reminiscent of ASP.

Part Two... not so much. It got extremely wordy, extremely self-reflective (part one sailed along) and the twist ending was in my view unlikely, unmotivated and did nothing to explain the entire novel's set-up. In short, I was disappointed.

YMMV

Does Salinger have any heirs? I'm pretty sure he was a recluse, although I know he had a fling with a young lady. I can't remember if he got her pregnant or not. I read The Catcher in the Rye--I didn't mind it, and although I no longer have my paperback copy, I will always value it because it was my friend Melanie's favorite book. Melanie was my bipolar friend who committed suicide a few months after I moved to Tennessee. She continues to haunt me. Not literally, of course, but you know what I mean. I've always felt a little responsible because I think I might've been her only real friend in those days, and when I left it hit her hard. She was found in the parking lot across from my apartment. Anyway, back to Salinger--the novel is okay, but I much prefer his short stories, my favorite being "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (at the end of which, ironically, the narrator kills himself). I've long gotten the feeling that Salinger was a repressed MAP. It comes through a bit in Catcher, but it really shows in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor," both of which are thematically somewhat similar to one of my all-time favorite films, the 1960s French film Sundays and Cybele. Note that there is a little girl in "Bananafish" named Sybil, which sounds an awful lot like Cybele, and both names come from mythology.

Of course, what I really love about these Salinger stories, including Catcher, is that they lay bare the reality that adults are often pretentious, a fact that kids can often see immediately. That, in a nutshell, is one of the key factors in why I (and probably a good many MAPs) find children more interesting than many/most adults. It isn't just that we are attracted to them physically; it is first and foremost their lack of pretentiousness that attracts us; the physical attraction, I suspect, follows that. And that's why I think Salinger was . . . well, one of us.

Markaba wrote:

Does Salinger have any heirs?

Hard to tell. The interwebs are a little unclear on that.

I last read Catcher In The Rye about four or five years ago. I tend to come back to it about every ten years or so. Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, and The Martian Chronicles are, I believe, the only books that I've read multiple times.

_Howard wrote:

Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, and The Martian Chronicles are, I believe, the only books that I've read multiple times.

The Door Into Summer, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Deadwood Beetle, Persistance of Vision, Gog, Walden, Dhalgren all have gained additional resonance as I've gotten older and re-read them as an adult.

Catcher in the Rye = hated it
On The Road = hated it
The Martian Chronicles = been so long since I read it I can't recall. Must not have made much of an impression.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Catcher in the Rye = hated it
On The Road = hated it

Me too.

Robert Frost's poetry has continued to resonate with me throughout the years, changing with me as I change.

I was never much impressed with the supposed classics: Catcher, Wuthering Heights, etc. I liked cheeky stuff: Twain's Letters From Earth or Poe's Cask.

How can you guys not like Salinger and Kerouac?

Come on, I'm the old fart here. You guys sound like someone's grandparents.

Kerouac reminded me of the Jackass movies -- there's no entertainment value in stupid. I feel the same way about Hunter S. Thompson if that's any consolation.

Kesey OTOH had some literary value, covering much the same territory.

It may be a generational thing.

I am a Kesey fan and I have a friend who used to party with Kesey. Woke up one morning in the barn with baby ducks walking all over him.