Long Live Holden Caulfield

I just read J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” for the first time since high school. Nearly 40 years later, it’s still as powerful as it was in the late 1980s, when I was trying to make sense of the effed-up world around me in lily white northern Michigan. I don't know that I've seen a fictional character brought to life quite like 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, warts and all. Published in 1951, this book, which takes place over a period of just two days, addresses teenage alienation, bullying, mental illness, sexual assault and suicide. It was banned, of course, when in fact it should be required reading in high school.

 

“… What I’d do, I figured, I’d go down to the Holland Tunnel and bum a ride, and then I’d bum another one, and another one, and another one, and in a few days I’d be somewhere out West where it was very pretty and sunny and where nobody’d know me and I’d get a job. I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere putting gas and oil in people’s cars. I didn’t care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody. I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. ..."