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This week on GLoP, CNN publishes a fake story and gets hoodwinked, and Catcher In The Rye is one of the seminal novels of the 20th century. Does it still have relevance for 21st century kids? The men of GLoP weigh in.
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Good job, Gents. This is the GLoP we love.
Kids would be better off reading Catcher in the Wry by Bob Uecker.
Fact check: True.
I think I made it through about three pages of Catcher in the Rye before I gave it up as lost.
On the other hand, I was digging through a pile of books in our attic once and I found Uecker’s book. I’ve probably read that at least five times. I wonder if it’s still there…
couch
Catcher in the Rye is an expression of the desperate cry of adolescence to matter.
Spoiler alert: They don’t. At least, not as much as they want to. People who were kids when this book came out had parents who killed Nazis in hand-to-hand combat on D-Day. There’s no way to live up to these titans if you’re one of these kids and insist upon mattering, and that frustration turned in on itself into self-indulgence.
In the discussion on Catcher in the Rye being the first time teenagers were represented, you need to do the math. Published in (I believe they said) 1962, Holden Caulfield is about 17, which gives you a 1945 birth date, right at the start of the Baby Boom. Like so many other things, it’s important because it’s about Boomers. I don’t see it lasting much beyond the time Boomer teachers retire.
I’m going on 64 and the Catcher in the Rye was the first book I really loved. (Much better to my mind than Little Women, Joe’s Boys, Three Little Peppers and How They Grew, and other classic titles my mother made me read before then.)
At this point, though, I have little interest in re-reading it—or any of the dozens of Salinger short stories I later devoured but didn’t really get. Its appeal, I think, derives not just from its self-absorbed, snarky teen voice (which was excitingly new), but also from the modern, postwar world its protagonist found wanting: cocktail parties, emotionally removed parents, teachers making inappropriate passes: innocence laid waste by the Bomb.
Salinger’s short stories had the added attraction of introducing many of us to Zen (his version of it, that is) and a completely different way of evaluating the world. For example: one is being sentimental, according to Seymour Glass, when one gives more grace to an object than god gave it. And then, of course, the now-derided question that sounded so cool back then: we know the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of one hand clapping? This was heady stuff in the suburbs in the mid to late sixties, what with Vietnam and the omnipresent threat of the Bomb.
But, like the movies The Graduate and Harold and Maude, which take up Salinger-like themes, Catcher in the Rye is caught up in its own time and no longer holds much appeal to me, except sentimentally as a romantic memory of my adolescence, of a world that, for better and for worse, no longer exists.
All in favor of leaving the pr0n jokes to seasoned G-File professional Jonah…
Whale oil is a renewable energy source. The global warmers should advocate responsible harvesting of whale oil as a way to fight climate disruption.
Whales are solar powered.
We have news podcasts on Ricochet galore. Rob Long and John Podhoretz are on newsy podcasts. We don’t need newsy stuff from GLoP.
Good stuff by the way.
They can look kind of Green, too.
You should have an episode on Laziness, considering the comment that reading carefully is difficult and it is far easier to shove characters into categories —- the white whaler, the South Seas native whaler, etc. Much of today’s fantasy-based journalism is driven by the easiness of repeating fantasies rather than tracking down identifiable sources and evidence. I know, as a former reporter, how difficult it can be to write a well-founded article on just about any subject. Suppose reporters who never questioned the Obama party line, and succumbed to laziness, are faced with an adversary in Trump—have they lost the urge to make a real effort to oppose him, or will they rely on fantasies in order to stay lazy?
In the book, “Shoeless Joe,” W.P. Kinsella’s elusive author was J.D. Salinger and the life changing book was “Catcher in the Rye.”
Salinger threatened to sue if they used it the movie. So Salinger became “Terance Mann” and “Catcher” became “The Boat Rocker.”
“Field of Dreams” was better off with James Earl Jones.
I did a grad-level Spanish lit program at an Ivy and studied Don Quijote from the best of the best.
Even they agree that STERNE was the first with the metafiction, and some define the first novel (as opposed to the first long-form narrative) as the first narrative with the metafiction going on.
In fact, my Quijote prof said that Madame Bovary was the first real novel, but I don’t remember why. (Dude. 20 years ago!) True, the protagonist reads novels and attempts to live novelistically, but then so did Alonso Quijano, though you can argue that he was reading books but not novels because Orlando Furioso was not the least bit meta.
Behold and lo, I was able to draw on my Romance Studies degree today. It’s all downhill from here.
I bought a “Streets Ahead” T-shirt from the NBC store back in 2012. Now that the phrase is having a resurgence, I can safely say that I was streets ahead of “streets ahead”.
Negative. That was the biggest and best egg laid in GLoP history. I reveled in the uncomfortable hilarity.
True. :)
I blame the crushing morosity.
Wait, I can’t believe you teased us with the Cervantes meta reference and didn’t explain that he incorporated an unauthorized sequel to Don Quixote into his own sequel of Don Quixote and uses it as a major plot point. And he may have been in on the unauthorized sequel in the first place. We need a show on this!
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/05/18/how-don-quixote-handled-an-unauthorized-sequel/
John, please stop talking. You are not as clever as you seem to think you are and you are stepping on the real talent. Introduce Rob and Jonah, and then wait for your cue for your clumsy segue.
No offense.
Wow, a lot of dislike for The Catcher in the Rye! This distaste surprises me as I think this book remains a great work of literature that will hopefully remain part of the pantheon for many generations to come.
I disagree with the theses that: (1) it is obsolete because it uses teenager slang that has fallen out of today’s vernacular; and (2) it attempts to affirm the self-importance of adolescence. It is a book about a depressed(probably bi-polar) teenager struggling to find his place in the world. The book emphatically does not hold him out as exemplary. Far from it. The book is about his attempt to overcome that myopic viewpoint and become truly authentic. That is the importance of the catcher-in-the-rye sequence in the book.
This theme has not changed or become obsolete. Consider Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace — a more recent book that has many of the same points. I’m sure there are other examples. It is part of the struggle of human nature and has been the subject of philosophy going all the way back to ancient Greece (Plato’s cave allegory?).
I think the book is not truly written for teenagers but for mature adults, especially ones struggling with depression. Those who have not struggled with depression may have trouble appreciating it. Teenagers may fall into the trap of believing the book is about point 2 above, when (at least in my reading of it) it is not. It is a mistake to assign the book to high school students.
By the way I am 39 and read the book for the first (and so far only) time about 4 years ago. I think a lot of the distaste GLoP’s generation has for the book stems from being forced to read it is teenagers. (I am not saying this is true for our hosts in particular; just that I think this may explain a lot of dislike for the book.)
On a separate note, I loved Rob Long’s faux-analysis of Moby Dick (which Jonah correctly points out has a least a grain of truth to it) and suggested reading guide/questions for discussion about it.
Catcher in the Rye was crap then and its crap now. Why anyone would inflict it on children today is beyond me.
According to wikipedia, it was published in 1951.
Maybe I misheard, maybe they misspoke. Not going to listen again to find out. Does make my point way less effective. I could weasel though, and say it became popular as school assignments in the 60’s and 70’s, so it is still subject to the Baby Boomer bias effect.
For what it’s worth, this episode of Radio Lab gets at what I had in mind re Cervantes/Quixote.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/real-don-quixote/
The moral and philosophical condemnation of Catcher / Caulfield, for what it’s worth, was articulated somewhat more persuasively in an essay by Mary McCarthy (which actually did come out in 1962, though the book came out in the 50s) and in the long monologue in the first scene of the play (and movie) Six Degrees of Separation (revealed later in the story to have been plagiarized by that character from a recent commencement speech at Choate! if memory serves), including the gesture (reprised here by John P.) of unloading the guilt for the Reagan and Lennon shootings on the book or its protagonist, which seems to me about as sensible as buying into Manson’s analyse du texte of the White Album.
There is another perspective that has not been broadcast as widely as that view but has occasionally been expressed, including (in part) by James Golden’s post here: that Holden Caulfield is not being held up as someone to worship and adore but is more of a “case study,” though of course one deserving of our sympathy since he is still in the process of grieving a younger sibling’s premature death. I agree with James Golden that it is a great work of literature, mostly because of its sadness. Caulfield also has an older brother who did fight in the war, whom he looks up to, by the way.
I still have on my shelves at home a copy of Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” that I received from my Grandmother [1904-1984] sometime during High School. I didn’t know it at the time, but according to one of my aunts both of my grandparents were big-time socialists in their youth.
I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever done more than skim through it.
I can’t find the story now, but wasn’t there a 12-year-old girl a few years ago whose appraisal of Catcher in the Rye was: If I met Holden Caulfield in an alley, I would stab him in the neck? The world being what it is, she got sent to the principal’s office for it instead of winning the Dorothy Parker Trenchant Criticism Award, juvenile division. Considering the probable prize on that, it may have worked out for the best.
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” –Dorothy Parker.
When Chevy Chase left Community, I hoped they would keep the character, having a different guest star play him every week, with only Abed recognizing the change(s).