When I was a teenager I read The Catcher in the Rye. I also read Catch-22, Calvin and Hobbes comics, wore Chuck Taylors, and listened to Nirvana, Queen’s Greatest Hits, and Dark Side of the Moon. I wasn’t exactly original. (Teenagers rarely are).
But maybe originality is overrated–not to mention a myth–and the reason why J.D. Salinger’s lone novel continues to sell in excess of 250,000 copies a year well over a half-century after its initial publication is because there is nothing original about its premise: a teenager hates his life. Holden Caulfield’s is the common voice of adolescent dissatisfaction, distilled down to its purest and most impotent rage. Sometimes you don’t need to read something original; sometimes you just need to know you’re not alone, that there’s someone else out there who understands.
Or Holden Caulfield is just a total spoiled brat, the epitome of unexamined privilege so devoid of real problems that he has to invent some to justify his narcissism, selfishness, and general dickishness. Such, increasingly, has been the summation of a growing number of folks, in the surprisingly burgeoning sub-genre of Catcher in the Rye re-reads.
These various responses, in fact, had me a tad trepidous to re-read Catcher myself. Even after Salinger’s death a decade ago in 2011, I couldn’t quite bring myself to revisit Holden. Some cherished childhood memories are best left in the past.
But then one day at the airport, disaster struck: I lost the book I was reading. Begrudgingly, feeling like a total amateur, I sauntered over to the Airport Bookstore & Minimart to find a replacement. Amidst all those paint-by-numbers spy thrillers, hackneyed romances, formulaic fantasies, flavor-of-the-week best-sellers, cash-grab celebrity bios, petulant political screeds, insipid self-help books, and insidious Get-Rich-Quick schemes, I felt a sort of nausea fill the pit of my stomach. “Bunch of phonies…” I found myself muttering.
That is, I was put in just the right mindset to re-read Catcher…which is why it startled me to find the book on the shelf! What strange company for Caulfield to keep! How ironic to be so surrounded by such “a bunch of phonies!” It almost felt like some secret joke perpetrated by an irate bookstore employee. I couldn’t resist: I bought a copy, and read it for the first time in 15 years.
Let’s get something out of the way first: Holden Caulfield is indeed insufferable. His critics are right. But what these same critics miss is that he is insufferable in the exact same way all teenagers are insufferable. That is an incredibly rare feet: in most film, TV, and fiction, teenagers are idealized, articulate, a fantasy of what we liked to imagine we were like at that age, rather than a reflection of what we actually were. Ferris Bueller is who we wanted to be; The Breakfast Club is who we pretended to be; but largely, Holden Caulfield is who we mostly were. I suspect that much of the adult backlash against Holden is sheer resentment, for reminding us of how embarrassing we all sounded in our teens, which we’ve spent most our adulthood trying to forget.
But here’s the other thing about Holden: he’s also self-aware! Multiple times throughout the novel, Holden mentions how he himself is a phony, duplicitous, inconsistent, and terrible. Pay attention for those moments if you choose to re-read it. Indeed, I dare say that a huge source of Holden’s frustration and anger is his growing awareness–which, as a true teenager, he still lacks the vocabulary to fully express–that he is in fact inextricably complicit with the phoniness of the world!
And that I think is why the novel continues to resonate even today: because we all feel that same rage at our own inescapable complicity. Our clothing is sewn by children in third-world sweatshops; our food harvested by exploited immigrant labor; our rubber comes from African and Malaysian slave plantations; our electronics from nightmarish Taiwanese factories, built with rare-earth minerals mined by Afghan child slaves; our diamonds from genocidal warlords; our gasoline from hyper-destructive industries; our high standard of living from ruthless corporations; and so on and so forth. In America, we are all spoiled, petulant, narcissistic brats, people who burn away all our many opportunities and invent problems to justify our misery–Holden, at least, is aware that he does so. He is also one of the few characters in fiction who actively tries to disavow all his unearned privilege–his stated desire is to run away from home and build some Thoreauvian cabin in the woods, after all–but he even fails to do that. The problem of privilege runs deep.
But depressed rich kids are not nearly universal enough to incite 65 million copies sold world-wide; what helps to transcends the problem of privilege in this text is, I suspect, a religious yearning that does not receive not nearly enough attention. It may sound rich to discuss religion in a text so rife with casual profanity (although Joseph Smith once said that “I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm yet deals justice to his neighbors and mercifully deals his substance to the poor, than the long, smooth-faced hypocrite”), but they are there all the same. These are made manifest in three very specific yearnings on Holden’s part permeating the novel:
- Yearning for the dead.
Holden’s moroseness and self-destructive tendencies don’t come from nowhere: Holden is grieving. Specifically, he is grieving for his younger brother Allie, who passed away from Leukemia three years earlier, who’s death Holden is still taking hard. Yet though he several times refers to himself as “kind of an atheist”, Holden cannot quite let go of the spiritual dimension amidst his grief. Indeed, in one key scene late in the novel, he even prays to the spirit of his dead brother:
“Anyway, I kept walking and walking up Fifth Avenue, without any tie on or anything. Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening. Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again. Boy, did it scare me. You can’t imagine. I started sweating like a bastard—my whole shirt and underwear and everything. Then I started doing something else. Every time I’d get to the end of a block I’d make believe I was talking to my brother Allie. I’d say to him, ‘Allie, don’t let me disappear. Allie, don’t let me disappear. Allie, don’t let me disappear. Please, Allie.’ And then when I’d reach the other side of the street without disappearing, I’d thank him.” (217–218)
Holden seems to cling to Allie as not only some sort of spiritual life-raft, but as something salvific, even redemptive. That is, there is a note of the redemption of the dead being essential for the redemption of the living in this passage. And indeed, it is a core doctrine of LDS theology that we without them cannot be made perfect; we spend immense fortunes on temples based on this idea.
2. Yearning for children, for of such is the Kingdom of God.
The novel’s title is derived from Holden’s love of children. When interrogated by one of the many well-meaning adults in his life as to what exactly his plans for the future are, what his ambitions are and how he hopes to possibly fulfill them if he keeps flunking out of school like this, Holden shares this vision, of all these innocent little children are playing in a rye field near a cliff’s edge, and anytime one of them gets too close, he catches them, and redirects them back–that is, Holden wishes to be a savior to little children, “for of such is the kingdom of God.” In fact, if we are to “become as little children” to inherit the kingdom, then suddenly so much of Holden’s behavior becomes not only understandable or relatable, but almost commendable. Certainly his desire to save children is in the neighborhood of Christ-like.
As is his absolute contempt for “phonies”–or as the Savior put it, “Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” (Matt. 23:13). He is also disgusted by how his older brother D.B. “prostituted” his talents to become a Hollywood screenwriter, by the self-righteous pretentiousness of his various private schools, by the scam perpetrated by the prostitute and her pimp, and so on and so forth. Though indisputably immature in almost every other way, what Holden is possessed of is a keen sense of fairness. Children likewise are possessed of a keen sense of fairness and fair-play; it is adults who must learn to be unfair, to “lie a little, take advantage because of his words, dig a pit for your neighbor” (2 Nephi 28:4). Simply telling children “Life isn’t fair” is notoriously stupid, since such is merely a statement of unfortunate fact, not an explanation or justification for it. If we are truly to become as little children, that will require the recovery of a certain sense of fairness and sincerity.
Indeed, in my experience, children can be devastatingly good people readers, because they can’t be fooled; they have not yet bought in to such a dishonest system for their own enrichment, and hence have no self-imposed blind-spots. And it is certainly worth noting that Holden is presented as a juvenile delinquent utterly unfit for adult society precisely because he refuses to buy into it. Which brings me to my final point:
3. Yearning for Zion.
Holden’s aforementioned desire to run away from home and live in a cabin in the woods is not just an adolescent desire for escape, but for withdrawal. Like Israel in the desert, the Rechabites, the Essenes of Qumran, Ether living in the cavity of a rock, John the Baptist living off locusts in the desert, and even the Saints settling the Salt Lake basin, Holden intuits that when the society becomes corrupt, then the only recourse left to an honest person is to withdraw. “Come to Zion” and “Babylon We Bid Thee Farewell” used to be hymns we meant quite literally.
And they can still be–or at least should be. Holden’s ultimate failure is rooted not just in his youthful immaturity, but in his lack of options to escape. The untamed, unclaimed wilderness of some mythical frontier America simply doesn’t exist anymore. If we are going to withdraw into an alternate economy untouched by avarice and corruption, we are going to have to construct it ourselves. Once upon a time, we called it the United Order; in the Temple we still call it the Law of Consecration; it is cited as the only economic order acceptable before the Almighty in Acts 2:48-48 and 4 Nephi 1:3-4, and is explicitly outlined in D&C 42 and elsewhere. This order was never supposed to be some pie-in-the-sky daydream, but a concrete reality, established on the American continent in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ, according to one of our 13 Articles of Faith.
I wasn’t going to bring up the Church’s current plateaued growth, but I think such is inescapable to note now, for there has been a great deal of hand-wringing lately across the spectrum that the gospel message simply isn’t resonating with the Youth of Zion anymore–or at least, not to the degree that it used to, if our conversion and retention rates are any indication. Yet as the 65 million and counting sales of Catcher in the Rye indicate well over a half century after its initial publication reminds us, there are yearnings that Youth everywhere are still feeling, burning beneath their finger-tips. It’s possible that they are yearning for Christ, redemption, reconciliation, to “lay aside the things of this world and seek for the things of a better” (D&C 25:10), without even realizing it. Those are the yearnings that we must tap into, and a re-read of J.D. Salinger’s lone novel might be as good a way as any to remember just what those are.