Re-Reading Holden

'He's so self-indulgent,' TBG shouts from the couch across the room, laptop cradled on her knees. Holden Caufield annoys her to no end. Despite the life-altering effect that Salinger's Nine Stories had on her as a teenager, thrusting her into a lifetime of painful and pointless humanities degrees (kidding), TBG never warmed to the peculiar progenitor of unhinged teenage angst.

The New York Times this weekend reports that she is not alone, 'Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as "weird," "whiny" and "immature." The alienated teenager has lost much of his novelty, said Ariel Levenson, an English teacher at the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Holden’s home turf. She added that even the students who liked the book tend to find the language — "phony," "her hands were lousy with rocks," the relentless "goddams" — grating and dated.'

These kids today are pretty perceptive, because the language of the book is goddam dated. That's not much of a detraction — Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is a period piece, a product of and reflection on a particular time. But the language shouldn't be a sticking point because it's nothing new for High School students. There are plenty of books read over four years of English classes that will seem old-fashioned and dated. Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville: the whole canon gang is a pretty tough slog.

The real problem isn't 'kids today'. The problem is with the way this book is taught. To wit: '"Holden Caulfield is supposed to be this paradigmatic teenager we can all relate to, but we don’t really speak this way or talk about these things," Ms. Levenson said, summarizing a typical response.' Holden may be many things to many people (a great compelling character, for example) but 'paradigmatic teenager' is not one of them.

How many kids go to (& get kicked out of) fancy boarding schools? How many are borderline psychotic? How many see through the 'phoniness' of the adult world? How many come from a wealthy family in New York City? Now find one teenager who encapsulates all of these. I tell you there's one, just one: Holden Caufield. And thank God for the one, and thank goodness there is just one.

Students need to be properly introduced to this book: it's a powerfully-written novel with a compelling, neurotic teenage character, written about a particular time, place, and social stratosphere of America. Holden is not the archetypal figure of American adolescence, and to propose that to a group of students today is foolish. They won't buy it, even if only out of rebelliousness, but mostly out of the good sense that their parents' generation seems to have lacked — the 1960s generation who 'saw themselves in the disaffected preppy.'

Cultural critic Morris Dickstein is quoted in the article, 'The skepticism, the belief in the purity of the soul against the tawdry, trashy culture plays very well in the counterculture and post-counterculture generation . . . I wouldn’t say we have a more gullible youth culture, but it may be more of a joining or togetherness culture.'

This is the standard reading. To better understand the reactions of young people, I offer an alternative. That vaunted skepticism reads, easily, as anti-intellectual adolescent solipsism (a form of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus). How are young people still expected to disdain 'tawdry, trashy culture' after thirty years of postmodernism has vindicated it in the face of perceived snobbery by the very people who worshiped Holden? And that word, gullible, is a tough one to swallow when most of those students had to teach their parents how to use a computer and watched the world fall apart on their parent's watch.

Young people have had enough of Holden. All things considered, maybe it's for the best.