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He also was an inspiration for Field of dreams (with Costner) but didn't agreed to be mentioned and threatened suing so he was replaced by fictional recluse writer Terrence Mann, played by Darth Vader's voice actor (sorry, forgot the name)
James Earl Jones? That's the first time I've heard him primarily referred to as Vader's voice actor. It's a commonly known factoid, but he's very well known otherwise.
My main way of thinking about Earl (whom I've seen in other movies, e.g. "Coming to America") or trying to convey who he is to another, is as "the guy who did Vader's voice".
He supposedly didn't even want the credit because Star Wars looked like it was going to be low-budget shlock when they were making it.
For all the Catcher hate in this thread, the short story collection "Nine Stories" may be more interesting to those who quit on Salinger based solely on traumatic coerced readings of Catcher.
Catcher in the Rye was substantially the most important book I've read in my life. It put in words the exact things I was feeling, and became a bible to me.
As I read the book several times as I got older, I remembered how I felt about compromise as a teenager, and yet understood what the teacher was trying to tell Holden. Things aren't as cut-and-dry to an adult as they are to a 16 year old.
That said, I believe this article is largely hogwash. Salinger wrote one phenomenal book. His other books, I felt, were boring and didn't have any of the same effects as Catcher in the Rye did. He's the literally equivalent of a one hit wonder.
And there's nothing wrong with it. I won't ever do what he did. But to romanticize Salinger's life as having some greater caller or meeting is a bit ridiculous. He wrote one good book and that's it, and he was a bit of a kook. End of story.
Yes, most definitely did. And it's hard to go back to his works once you're not a teenager anymore. Which doesn't mean he wasn't great in his way.
I will probably burn all my virtual karma, but I just need to say this: I hated Catcher in the Rye with a passion. I used to do a lot of reading, still do my fair share, but just could not stand that book.
> I will probably burn all my virtual karma, but I just need to say this: I hated Catcher in the Rye with a passion. I used to do a lot of reading, still do my fair share, but just could not stand that book.
There's a very short window in which one can read Catcher for the first time and still enjoy it. It's that 3 year window between 13ish and 16 where you've just begun having all these angsty thoughts about the world, yet have no context or understanding for them. Outside of that, it just comes off as a whiny entitled kid doing nothing. But within that context, it's a seminal coming of age story. I can distinctly remember the ending being the first work of art to move me to tears.
Seems like it would still be enjoyable to someone with empathy enough to identify with a human being in that situation. Characters don't have to be good people to be likable. And for that matter, characters don't necessarily need to be likable to make a book enjoyable or interesting.
It's been a while, but I remember Holden as a flawed and frustrating individual with a good heart, who's in the process of learning that's not sufficient to carry him through life.
You raise an interesting point. Do you think that the story must be "mythic"?
When I was young, I kind of got where "Peter" of "Ender's Game" was coming from. And I kind of felt that Darth Vader in "The Empire Strikes Back" was having some sort of conflicted issue. But I never felt that from the bullies in the books like "Little House on the Prairie". Maybe I'm a SciFi geek (and that may well be the answer), or maybe we only feel empathy for bad people when the play is writ large?
What say you?
Hmm, that's an interesting point. I wasn't thinking of Holden as a classic villain per se. I don't know about LHOP, but could be they were just flat and poorly written characters? (Not to offend any fans, not every character must be fully developed!).
I guess that's all it is. Holden was not a great guy, but he was developed and at least somewhat complex (although I've seen a fair amount of reduction in this thread). That goes a long way to making a character relatable. Yes, Peter's an absolute dick, but he has reasons for being one that make sense to him, if not everybody else.
FTR, much more controversial than saying Holden was a whiny kid, I found Frodo Baggins to be largely insufferable, but that didn't stop me from enjoying LOTR.
>There's a very short window in which one can read Catcher for the first time and still enjoy it. It's that 3 year window between 13ish and 16 where you've just begun having all these angsty thoughts about the world, yet have no context or understanding for them.
This window (up to the 60s-70s) has probably opened to ages 13-35 today (considering how many 30+ people watch the tritest superheroes movies with even less substance than the Catcher and then discuss them as serious works...).
Thank God.
I'm am a few (couple? few?) decades past the target audience, but I have re-read the book from the age of 13, for about every 3 years[0], and I keep wondering what is wrong with me that I don't get why this is a great book? I have never gotten it, and I have continued to think that I am defective in not understanding a "Great American Novel"
[0] Yes - over 10 times now...
If you can't see any value in the book, try to read critiques of the book, and see what other people see in it.
I read it in that era of my life, and I still disliked it more or less because it was a whiny entitled kid doing nothing! It really seemed like a canned Madison Avenue product designed to appeal to teenagers.
Come to think if it, the only things I remembered enjoying in my forced high school reading was Macbeth and Tale of Two Cities.
One thing I did really like from that era which I suspect wouldn't age well if I tried it now for the first time was Dune.
Try it. It ages better than Ender's Game.
>it was a whiny entitled kid doing nothing!
The "doing nothing" part can be found in tons of great literature and movies. Most of us, throughout most of our lives and days, "do nothing" as well...
Not everything has to have a trite Pixar/Heroes Journey like arc.
I read at 19 loved the book but loved franny and zooey more. Something may have been lost by that age.
that 3 year window between 13ish and 16
That's when I read it! I guess I got lucky. I have no real inclination to read it again.
My high school english teacher, wonderful woman, always said that Holden was "just stupid."
Not in a way to devalue the literature, but as a character trait.
I actually really liked that analysis. The way forward for Holden is to get over himself and stop wallowing in his past. (Spoiler: he doesn't). She really cut to the chase, in a way a lot of teenagers probably need to hear.
This is accurate. Holden Caufield is full of shit. He's a classic unreliable narrator, in a formal sense, but also in a deeper cultural one.
Every year hundreds of thousands of students are put off from this book by how much they dislike Caulfield. Too few of their teachers tell them "that's exactly the point, he's got his head up his ass but he's absolutely sure he's right about everything. One page he thinks X and he's contemptuous of all disagreement but ten pages later he's totally convinced of Not X. That's how most adults think of their teenage selves. Reflect on this."
People talk about it as a coming-of-age book, and in a sense it is, but it's a lot less like American Graffiti and a lot more like American Psycho.
^ best one-sentence summation of this book I've ever seen.
"Catcher" and "This Side of Paradise" are kind of a binary system for studying the pathology of American youth culture.
Probably could burn less virtual karma if you made your comment more interesting by saying WHY you hated it. The plot? The characters? The typesetting? The pages gave you paper-cuts? Tell us Why!
You are right, I was just ranting... As others have already mentioned, I think the best summary is "Holden Caulfield is full of shit". I hated his whiny attitude throughout the whole book, and I did not feel any sense of closure at the end.
I felt he was full of shit also but since I was just reading for pleasure instead of being assigned the book, I stopped really early.
I’m a high school English teacher, and I’ve never liked it. Didn’t like it in high school; don’t care for it now (and don’t teach it).
Thank you!
This is the most common reaction I've heard over the years to that book. Perhaps because it's jammed down everyone's throats in high school English classes. Perhaps it's the coming of age book of a certain generation, which feels wrong to the next that takes all its observations for granted.
I didn't get it either, why this book is so beloved of literature teachers.
One of the problems is that it seems to have created a trope of "young genius author creates a single amazing work and is troubled" which is used in some dire films.
Ruby Sparks, The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, Chasing Holden, there's a bunch of them and they suck.
https://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/sidney-hall-review-sundanc...
Not a big fan of it either, though it's important to recognize that given the era it was released (early 1950s), it was quite ahead of its time. Perhaps ahead by at least 2 decades in anticipating American youth's punk culture, that we see from the mid-70s onward.
As a side note, you might give his later Franny and Zooey (1961) a try, finding a more nuanced Salinger at work.
I will probably go down in flames with you, because I felt the same, though I liked his other works like Franny & Zooey.
Catcher was full of slang that I simply couldn't relate to. For me, it wasn't that different from reading Shakespeare in high school...focusing on interpreting the language got in the way of my ability to empathize.
Franny & Zooey... meh. The characters are cardboard cutouts, not people. I couldn't relate to them at all. You can't imagine wanting to have a conversation with any of them.
Not a fan either, but I also didn't read it until I was over 30 and couldn't stomach the narrator. I think most of my friends who recommended it had read it when they were teenagers not as adults.
For anyone who just can’t connect to this book, or doesn’t “get” it, maybe this quote will help. I read the book as a kid and liked it, but when I reread it as an adult this passage stopped me dead in my tracks and I cried; damn near sobbed. In my view, it’s the very center of the entire narrative.
> My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren't just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I'll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I'd see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence--there was this fence that went all around the course--and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That's the kind of red hair he had. God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair. I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while when it rains and all, and I can't make a real fist any more-- not a tight one, I mean--but outside of that I don't care much. I mean I'm not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway.
I wonder if you would change your mind if you thought about the fact that Holden wasn’t just an angsts teen but a victim of sexual abuse? IMO that changes the whole read
Was this stated / implied in Catcher in the Rye (I honestly don't remember), in some other work by Salinger, or is it the result of one of those works of psychological analysis that purport to tell us what really goes on in a novel?
It pains me to see high school English teachers of a certain age keep assigning "Catcher in the Rye" to their students. Those forced readings must account for a large share of the 250,000 copies sold per year.
As the Tablet article acknowledges, most of Salinger's writing is a relic of 1950s NYC. Why linger, stuck, in that misshapen world? We're blessed with so many newer authors and so many different cultures that have something to say. High school is a great time for students to discover authors that speak to them -- whether that's Zadie Smith or Neal Stephenson. If that means hitting "refresh" on the assigned reading list, please have the courage to do so!
Let Salinger fade into the back stacks of libraries, hanging out with Thackeray, Dreiser and other novelists in the land of long-ago bestsellers that now rest quietly in obscurity.
I felt the same way when they sang Imagine at New Years 2019 in Times Square. America is still stuck in the mid 20th century.
Christmas often feels this way as well. The musical canon was was locked in with the childhood of baby boomers.
A lot of Christmas is locked into Victorian England which itself derived from Germany.
I assume you have seen the xkcd illustrating this issue:
I'm sure in 40 years kids will be saying that we're still stuck in the turn of the millennium.
But I also hate Imagine. A world where no one plans anything, and there's nothing worth fighting for and all of our culture is gone, replaced with godless communism. Sounds like a real dystopia to me. I can imagine Lennon's world, and I'd fight it to the end. The music is solid though, as expected of Lennon.
However I do think that the world without imaginary jealous fathers in the sky watching everything you do (often even requesting his followers to kill those who don’t believe in him in order to get to an imaginary place where they would have nothing to fight for) would indeed be better.
I don't think Lennon saw the dystopia in that.
There's plenty of dystopia in a nationalistic world where everyone is embedded in local cultural reality tunnels too. Every political paradigm seems to turn into some kind of dystopia when taken to an extreme.
Taking the words of a singer literally is a bit of a misnomer.
It's like saying Little Prince doesn't make any sense because the planets he visited were too small to have any gravity at all. The book isn't about that.
Besides, being from a purely communist country myself Imagine always felt more about friendship (read "cooperative behaviour"), rather than "we should all live in a socialist world where everyone is absolutely selfless".
PS: Saying that, I know Lennon was more communist that capitalist. But who really cares about what musicians say about politics? He inspires me to take a pragmatic stance on his ideas and transform them into something real.