The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

How on Earth do you write a negative review of a book that everyone tells you is a classic – even the people who haven’t read it?

I turned the first twenty or so pages of The Catcher in the Rye with eager anticipation. It had been on my ‘To Read’ list for a long, long time. I was bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

Holden Caulfield is a troubled teenager. A student at a prestigious school called Pencey, his story begins shortly after he has been thrown out for failing every one of his classes except for English. Holden only has a few days left before will need to break the news to his parents. He is so frightened about it that he can barely stand it.

Holden hates everybody he goes to school with. He thinks they’re all ‘phonies’. He decides to leave earlier than he should and travel to New York, where he plans to take some time for himself before he has to tell his parents that he’s been excluded. The problem is, Holden is lonely and depressed. He wants to be around people constantly. Even people he hates.

Over a few days he arranges meeting after meeting with people from his past, but they only ever make him feel better for a little while. Mostly he just ends up hating them more than he did before.

Nothing much more happens in this book than that.

Before I read The Catcher in the Rye I felt sure there must be a movie of it out there somewhere, and I was surprised I had never heard anything about it. There isn’t a movie as far as I can find. The reason for that is that nothing happens in this book. Not really. There is no definitive beginning, middle and ending to Holden Caulfield’s story, and there appears to be no real resolution to any of his problems. It is merely a depiction of a small period in a troubled young man’s life.

I will say this though, Salinger is a master at writing a character. I knew Holden Caulfield so well towards the end of this book that I could predict what he was going to say next. Impressively, even though he was totally weird, I could identify with him. His teenage angst was written perfectly. I remember feeling that lost and alone when I was younger.

Reading The Catcher in the Rye feels like being stuck inside the head of someone who is borderline bipolar. It is an exhausting and unsettling experience, and you will most certainly spend the majority of it anxiously waiting for Holden to go on some sort of killing spree or end his own life. I understand why there is no movie now – there is no way that anyone could effectively portray this character without some sort of corny voiceover revealing what is happening inside his head, because his actions never correspond with what he thinks. He is one of those characters who is so complex that only cleverly constructed written words can effectively portray what is happening in his mind and in his surroundings simultaneously and in a believable way.

Read this if you like ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’. The tone is very similar. Somber, thought provoking and frustrating in an enticing way – the type of frustrating that keeps you reading.