A Gen Z Reviews the Classics: On rereading 'The Catcher in the Rye' and wanting to save Holden

‘A Gen Z Reviews the Classics’ is a new weekly column on Firstpost. We revisit great books and films, and talk about why they remain relevant even today.

People always ask which book changed your life, and personally I think that’s a fairly hard question to answer. But if I had to pick one, it would be The Catcher in the Rye, no contest.

I read it at the right time, in the right place, and I've gone back to it since, four times at least by my count.

I first read it at a boarding school in the mountains, which sounds perfectly romantic until you remember we had no phones, sixty minutes a month to call our parents, and basically no contact with anyone outside the gates.

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It was an all-girls school, and it did get lonely at times. But I think I would have lost my habit of reading altogether if I hadn't been stuck somewhere that forced it on me. I spent a lot of time in the library, working through a stack of classics, and, yes, plenty of children's books too, Roald Dahl included.

Then one year a Scholastic book fair came to the school, and we were each given a bit of money to spend on books. I picked three, one of which was The Catcher in the Rye. I knew it was a classic, hugely popular, possibly on the American high school syllabus, though I wasn't entirely sure. The cover was just plain blue, the title in a rather lovely font, nothing else on it. I bought it because it intrigued me, and then it sat unread for a few weeks until, one afternoon, I finally picked it up. I still remember the date: the 26th of October, 2018.

I have this habit of writing the date and place inside the front cover of any book I begin. In this one, I drew a little hill, meant to be the slopes at school, my favourite place to sit, the highest point on the grounds apart from the library, with a view of the whole school, the road below, and the mountains beyond it. I bunked class constantly that year, economics and political science most of all, and it was up on those slopes that I finished the book in two days flat.

Holden and his roommates

I was hooked from the first line, the one about not wanting to get into all that David Copperfield business (essentially in the manner of telling a story). The book is about a sixteen-year-old boy who is clearly unhappy and sensitive, and who you could read either as remarkably self-aware or as someone who simply cannot sit with his own feelings.

The first time I read it, I felt completely seen. I look at the world in much the same way Holden does, especially early on, when he describes his roommates, Stradlater and Ackley, neither of whom is particularly clean, and how much it genuinely bothers him to live alongside people like that. But he's also kind to Ackley in his own way, extending small gestures, just to make him feel seen even when Ackley is getting on his nerves. I think part of why I love this book is that I have (what I think could be) OCD, (or something close to it, I have not pursued a diagnosis of any kind), and the way that filth nags at him sounds rather familiar.

There is a lot of love sits inside how plainly he writes about his family: his sister Phoebe, and his brothers D.B and Allie. Holden glosses over pain because he doesn't want to sit in it, but he understands other people's feelings with real tenderness, not least where the girl he never quite calls, Jane, is concerned.

The language does the grieving Holden won't

Something I only paid attention to on my third or fourth read: Holden Caulfield is, technically, a bad writer. Not the prose overall, since Salinger clearly knew what he was doing with this voice, but the habits Holden falls into as a narrator. He hedges constantly, softening nearly everything with "sort of," a phrase that shows up so often across the book it stops feeling like a verbal tic and starts feeling like a refusal, his way of never fully committing to a statement about his own life.

And he reaches for the passive voice in exactly the spots a writing teacher would mark down: he doesn't stand on the hill overlooking the football game, he was standing there, as if the standing happened to him rather than something he chose to do.

The passive voice puts distance between a person and the thing that happened to them, and Holden needs that distance. The reason he's on the hill instead of down at the game is that he's just been expelled from his fourth school, and he lost the fencing team's equipment on the subway, making the whole team forfeit a match he wasn't even playing in. That's mortifying to admit outright, so he doesn't.

Then, every so often, the hedging just stops. The "sort ofs" disappear, the passive voice drops away, and a plain, direct sentence lands hard. The clearest example is the line about his dead brother Allie's baseball mitt, covered in poems Allie used to read to himself out in the field when nobody was up at bat, a detail so specific it's already doing damage before the next line arrives: he's dead now. Not that he died, not that he passed away, but that he is dead, present tense, in a book written almost entirely in the past tense. That one grammatical choice carries more than pages of direct statement could, because it tells you Allie's death isn't something Holden has recovered from.

The same thing happens around the word "listen," which Holden uses to open conversation after conversation, and which almost nobody listens to. He says it to Ackley, who ignores him. He says it to Luce, who cuts him off mid-sentence. It's only at the end of the book, walking with his little sister Phoebe, that Holden says "listen" and someone finally does.

A book about a boy who wants to freeze time, who can't even throw a snowball at a car because it looks too nice and white to ruin, who wants to catch children before they fall off a cliff into an adulthood he associates with phoniness, ends with the one moment someone actually hears him. Salinger buries that inside a single repeated word instead of announcing it. Barely anything happens in this book.

Still running, still catching

A year or two later, a boy at university asked me what my favourite books were. I told him, The Catcher in the Rye among them, and not long after, he'd read it too. He loved it as much as I did. I've reread the book since, once during a phase when I had no patience for casual misogyny in anything I picked up, and Holden irritated me more that time round. But by the third reading, something had actually changed in me. I no longer wanted to be Holden.

I wanted to save him, to catch him the way he wants to catch every child before the cliff, to stop him running and get him to stand still long enough to feel something. I still love that boy a bit, for reading it because I did, and for loving it. Seventy-five years on, I think that's still the whole ask of this book,just to stand still with someone for a minute, and let them catch you.