The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger

9/10

Jerome David Salinger that is. Ha ha, I love starting out a post like that with an author that goes by initials. I just finished reading this book this morning. It was funny and entertaining and a very fast read. Also, J.D. Salinger actually just died on January 27th of this year, about four days before I started reading his one and only novel. It's a shame he didn't write more.

The book is about a kid who seems to be manic-depressive, named Holden Caulfield, who keeps flunking out of school because he doesn't care much about it. He's capable, he just doesn't care. I think the book covers just two days of Holden's life right after he gets kicked out of another school. He's a good and likable kid, I thought, but he is definitely a touch on the crazy side. He continues to go back and forth between things that depress him and things that "kill him", meaning he finds them funny. Salinger does a good job at allowing us to enter into Holden's brain. The book is almost entirely Holden's thoughts about things that bother him that other people do. His thoughts are so funny. I didn't find the book to be too depressing even though it's about a young kid who is always depressed and a little aimless in life.

On a side note, the guy who shot John Lennon said he did it to promote this book. TIME magazine has a good article about Salinger if anyone's interested: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1957492,00.html I wonder how different Salinger and Holden were, they seem not too far apart. They'd almost have to be with how realistically Salinger was able to portray the thoughts of a sometime cynical kid.

Also, if anyone is wondering what the title to the book means. It comes from a Robert Burns poem that says "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." But Holden thought it was "If a body catch a body coming through the rye." And as his awesome thoughts go, he tells his sister when she asks what he wants to do in his life that he pictures a bunch of young kids running around playing in a field of rye and he is standing at the edge of a big cliff and he catches them before they fall off. "That's all I'd do all day. I'd be the catcher in the rye." This is why I didn't get too depressed over this book because he was good at heart. And funny.

A few examples of Holden being funny:

"'Liberate yourself from my vicelike grip.'" He says this to his roommate when Holden randomly decided to put him in a half-nelson while his roommate was getting ready for a date.

"The one ugly one, Laverne, wasn't too bad a dancer, but the other one, old Marty, was murder. Old Marty was like dragging the statue of liberty around the floor." Oh man, that made me laugh like crazy. That killed me, as Holden would say.

"Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it." True, true.

"He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you." Ha ha. Forty fingers? Hilarious.

Post Script: The book has a lot of cussing, you are here forewarned.