The Angry Czeck

I’ve begun this post about three different times, and every time I do, it sounds phony.

There’s nothing original here. We all liked The Catcher in the Rye. We more than liked it. We loved it; made it a Bible. When we were stupid and horny teenagers, Salinger gave voice to an anger we didn’t even realize we had. Only Jack Kerouac had a similar impact – the ability to transmogrify gentle English majors into insufferable blowhards.

Such was Salinger’s power. He could magically transform a teenage conformist into a pretentious cynic in just one reading. That’s exactly what happened to me. After finishing Catcher in the Rye, I was goddamn Holden Caulfield, and I could spot a phony from a mile away. It was easy enough. Everybody was a phony. Quite frankly, it took me half a dozen years to recover from Catcher in the Rye. I’m lucky. Some of us never get better.

Last time I read Catcher in the Rye, a little less than a year ago, it confirmed what I had already long suspected: Holden is a depressed and melodramatic teenager who needs professional help. Holden never had any magical insight into the human condition. He just failed to get over his little brother’s sad demise. If Holden were my kid, he’d get on my nerves.

Maybe that’s why Salinger embraced his seclusion. Maybe he understood that Holden wasn’t the super-genius his deranged acolytes had mistakenly christened him. Maybe he was a little embarrassed for us.

In his short story collection Nine Stories, Salinger seems to be warning us that Holden wasn’t the role model his admirers had made him. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the brilliant malcontent, Seymour, commits suicide. In “Teddy,” the emotionally detached clairvoyant Teddy is murdered by his own sister. The pretentious protagonist in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” manages to survive, but only because he suddenly realizes what a blowhard he had become.

It was like Salinger was saying, “Look, you knuckleheads! These are screwed up fictional characters. Avoid in real life!”

We didn’t, though. We admired the precocious intellect of the Glass Family’s children, secretly wishing that we could be adopted into the brood. We “borrowed” Holden Caulfield’s vocabulary, sprinkling a liberal dose of “goddamns” in every painful short story we wrote. We drank way too many rum and cokes. And if you’re me, you adopted a random bit of Salinger’s writing and ingrained it into your own less-than worthy blog.

“Brief but penetrating” comes from a letter written by the narrator’s sister in the story “Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenter,” my favorite Salinger story. The succinct phrase stuck with me the moment I read it. Didn’t that describe anything Salinger wrote? Brief but penetrating? You can reasonably read Catcher in the Rye in one day. If only I could be so penetrating in my briefness.

I spent six college semesters thinking I was J.D. Salinger until I realized that my campus was bursting with similar phonies. They were, as Holden said, falling out of the windows. We weren’t cool! We were nerds! Dorks! And not the good kind nerd and dork, either. We had chosen a life-path that would lead us to our parent’s basement, forever typing and being rejected by the establishment we swore to hate.

I’d have to find my own goddamned voice.

J.D. Salinger is dead, and at 91 years of age it’s hardly a tragedy. The man hadn’t given us new material in decades, yet we venerated him as a sage of our generation. His observations had become ours, even mine for a time, though I was born long after he had published his last word. Salinger was smart. He went out on top.

May we never see The Catcher in the Rye 2: Beyond Thunderdome.

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