Last week I was talking with a colleague about the new J.D. Salinger exhibition at the New York Public Library, and it got me thinking about the first time I read The Catcher in the Rye, back in the fourth grade. It was a very memorable experience, but perhaps not for the reasons you’d expect.

I should probably explain that my mother recommended The Catcher in the Rye to me, just like she recommended many books during my childhood she thought I would enjoy. My parents, as a rule, weren’t worried about exposing me to things that were too mature; they didn’t want me exposed, however, to things they considered "too dumb." It’s why I wasn’t allowed to watch Laverne & Shirley every week like the rest of my classmates, but was allowed to watch the Gargoyles TV movie (which made me the coolest person in my class for one brief, shining moment)!

YA literature was just starting to boom when I was growing up in the 1970s, and I was reading above my grade level, so my parents encouraged me to find books from the young adult section of the public library. That’s how I started reading books by Norma Klein, Richard Peck, M.E. Kerr, Norma Fox Mazer, and (one of my all-time favorites!) Judy Blume.

If we were out of library books at home, my parents would look through their bookcases and pick a book for me, to see if I enjoyed it. That’s how I got my hands on The Catcher in the Rye.

First Impressions of The Catcher In the Rye

My first impressions were the book was awesome and hilarious (with words like "goddam" and "backasswards"!), and I loved how parts were set in a New York City that I knew well. When Holden talked about the witch doctor in the canoe at the Museum of Natural History, I was excited because I had stood there myself many times, looking at that same figure. I’d gone to the zoo and the carousel in Central Park. I’d seen the mummies at the Metropolitan Museum.

Holden had family problems and school problems, and I could identify with both. Holden didn’t like phonies, and hey, I didn’t like them either! Even a kid could understand why people who acted nice, but really weren’t nice, were very annoying. Holden was smart, funny, and sarcastic, which were all qualities I admired.

Of course, there were many things I didn’t understand in this book, which was written decades before I was born, with lots of language and concepts that were foreign to me. I deduced that "crumby" probably meant the same thing as "crummy," which was similar to "lousy" or "bad." But what was a "throw," and why did it cost cost five dollars? And what was the ring Phoebe kept trying to reach while she was on the carousel? I would try to use context clues to solve some of my questions but, sometimes, I had zero context. So I just kept reading until I could get back into the story.

An Adult Encounter

One day, I was reading The Catcher in the Rye while standing in the lobby of my apartment building. One of our nosier neighbors, a middle-age woman named Irene, who tended to share her opinions at a volume level that defied logic, saw the book in my hands and said, "The Catcher In the Rye?! I didn't read that book until I was 35!" An adult was yelling at me and I didn’t know how to react, so I just stared back at her, frozen like a deer in the headlights. I was a shy, quiet kid who didn’t talk back to adults. I wanted to answer her and defend myself, but I wasn’t even sure about the target of her anger. Was she mad at me? My parents? J.D. Salinger? Was she upset because she knew that she was one of those phonies Holden couldn’t stand?

The questions swirled around in my head, but I kept my mouth shut and just waited for her to leave. Later on, I told my mother about this conversation, and I remember that she was upset but told me not to worry about it. The whole exchange did make me seriously think about putting brown paper covers on all my books in the future, so people wouldn’t be able to judge me by the books I read. 

Catching Up with Holden Again

Years later, while in high school, I reread The Catcher in the Rye. There were many aspects of the story that resonated with me even more than before. Now, I was a teenager dealing with hormones, mood swings, and more life experience. I’d met more phonies by that time, sometimes kids but mostly grownups. I found that I could identify with Holden more than I did as a child.

But the biggest shock was when I discovered Holden Caulfield had an encounter with a prostitute! I still had Irene’s voice ringing in the back of my head from all those years ago, and I wondered… was she right? Should my mother never have given me that book when I was so young? I asked my mother and she said that she knew if a part of the book was too advanced for me, it would go over my head. She asked, "Did you even know there was a prostitute in the book?" I had to admit that I had no idea. Score one point for mom logic!

I read The Catcher in the Rye again in college and, while I still identified with a lot of what Holden says and feels, I sometimes felt he was trying my patience. I still appreciated his humor and sarcasm, but I just wanted to shake him sometimes and say, "The world doesn’t revolve around you!" However, by then, I had even more life experience and more historical context, so I understood parts of the book better than before. It turns out those "free ride" rings on a carousel were much smaller than I’d imagined! And on a related note… free rides on carousels used to be a thing?

A Timeless Classic for Today?

I know The Catcher in the Rye is sometimes confusing to modern teenagers, who can’t understand what Holden is complaining about. On the other hand, I was holding this book when I walked into my last Teen Advisory Group meeting and, as soon as my kids saw the cover, they started telling me how much they loved the book! This question comes up with many "classic" stories: do they age well and still appeal to modern audiences?

For example, I’m a big fan of the movie Rebel Without a Cause, the 1955 film starring James Dean, another older story about a disaffected teenager. When I watch that film, I’m genuinely enjoying it part of the time, but also enjoying it ironically because it feels so over-the-top and ridiculous. I never considered how teens would have reacted to the film seeing it when it was first released.

But earlier this year, I was searching local newspaper archives for Teen Throwback Thursday material, and discovered that a group of teens was so moved by Rebel Without A Cause, and so identified with Dean's Jim Stark and the other characters, they wrote a letter to the editor of The Riverdale Press in 1956!

I guess the point to remember is that we should always consider how a story affected contemporary audiences, as well as modern ones.

Revisiting The Catcher

I just re-read The Catcher in the Rye again this week, curious to see how this book has aged for me, discover which plot details I’d remembered or forgotten, and see whether reading it as a full-fledged adult would make a difference in how much I empathized with Holden Caulfield.

As I started reading, I remembered some aspects of the book I enjoyed, like how Holden tells the story directly to the reader, his humor and sarcasm, and how he uses lots of italics to emphasize his points! On the other hand, The Catcher in the Rye is about as politically incorrect today as you might expect from a book written in the 1940s. I understood a lot more of the language this time around, but still had to use context clues to decipher some of those old expressions. I was surprised to discover I found the story more depressing than I have before. I still enjoyed listening to Holden’s voice but found myself wanting to get him the mental and emotional help he needed. I also thought a lot more about his parents’ frustration this time around.

I’m still not a fan of phonies, but as a grownup with even more life experience (and someone who works in public service), I think I’ve become more tolerant over time. Or maybe it’s that there are so many things that could irritate me about life and people, that… I just have to pick my battles. If I let things annoy me as much as they do Holden, I’d be dealing with some pretty big ulcers by now.

NYC Landmarks, Via Holden Caulfield

Re-reading the book also made me think about the NYC landmarks that are mentioned, and how much they’ve changed or stayed the same. If you try to retrace Holden’s steps, you’ll have at least some success. If you visit the American Museum of Natural History, you can still see the Great Canoe. But it isn’t at eye level any more—now it’s suspended from the ceiling, and the witch doctor and other figures are no longer inside. Also, you can still see the mummies in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

If you go to Central Park, you can walk around the pond and think about what happens to the "goddam ducks" when the pond freezes over in the winter. (You should definitely open that link. The Central Park Conservancy addresses the duck question!) You can also visit the carousel, although you won’t lean out of your seat to reach for rings to get free rides!

Since Holden was on my mind this weekend, I made a pilgrimage to that Central Park carousel for the first time in years. Going there was a good reminder it’s still one of the best places to visit in New York City to think about childhood, innocence, happiness, and nostalgia for simpler times. 

If you’d like to learn more about Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye, and J.D. Salinger, here are a few ways to get started:

New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye edited by Jack Salzman

Salinger by David Shields

J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist by Thomas Beller

J.D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski

Rebel in the Rye (DVD)

And be sure to visit the J.D. Salinger Exhibition at NYPL, at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, through January 19, 2020!