This book is often cited as ’the’ book given to young adults just turning serious reading. I read it when I was 20 (perhaps 6 years too old?). Most young readers immediately identify with the protagonist Holden Caulfield. Even setting aside the fact that most young people start out that way, ( I remember my pretentiousness- I used to identify myself with Stephen Daedalus of ’’Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’’) the number of teenagers who imagine Holden’s thoughts as their own is mind-numbing. I, on the other hand, was completely put off by him. Here is a boy who is bent upon destroying his good fortune, behaving like a child when he is supposed to move into adulthood.
To put in Holden’s own words, this book is essentially about phoniness. Holden’s cynicism at what he perceives as ’’adult hypocrisy’’ is a rather pathetic excuse for his own failure at coping with the world. Another disgusting behaviour of his (to my pious Brahmin ears) is his overriding obsession about sex, and his almost habitual lying. Although he is ashamed about it, he revels in this dark side of his life. His only redeeming feature is his innocent and genuine love he feels towards his (non-adult) sister Phoebe and brother Allie.
The scenes about Allie’s baseball mitt, Holden musing about the ducks in the lake at Central Park and Phoebe’s fondness for the movie --- are really touching and bring out the child part in Holden. On the other hand, his (hesitant) steps towards the adult world are dark and foreboding. Salinger paints a grim and desolate future -- for Holden’s as well as our future.
What readers don’t realize is that by describing the book completely from Holden’s viewpoint, Salinger manages to expose his faults and limitations more effectively than he would have done, say, by narrating from an adult viewpoint. Salinger convincingly manages to convey the emotional feelings and the mental thought process of a teenager -- without any of his adult moralizing creeping into it.
This, I suppose, is the strongest point of the book. (Joyce had also used this literary technique in ’’Portrait’’, but then he is a different class altogether, as also from a different era.)
Overall I think that, though this book has proved to be popular beyond anybody’s (even Salinger’s) expectations, it has been so for all the wrong reasons. A good book to read when you are 14 years old, maybe not much so at 20, but who knows, you may even savor it when you are 60.