On Wednesday, a federal judge granted a temporary
restraining order forbidding publication in the United States of “60 Years
Later: Coming Through the Rye,” a takeoff on — J. D. Salinger’s lawyers
say rip-off of — “The Catcher in the Rye,” written by a young Swedish writer
styling himself J. D. California.Until the judge makes her final ruling, Mr.
Salinger’s fans will be spared the prospect of encountering Holden Caulfield,
the ultimate alienated teenager, as a lonely old codger who escapes from a retirement
home and his beloved younger sister, Phoebe, as a drug addict sinking into
dementia.But Holden may have bigger problems than
the insults of irreverent parodists and other “phonies,” as Holden would put
it. Even as Mr. Salinger, who is 90 and in ailing health, seeks to keep control
of his most famous creation, there are signs that Holden may be losing his grip
on the kids.“The Catcher in the Rye,” published in
1951, is still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers
who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers.
Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What
once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny”
and “immature.”The alienated teenager has lost much of his
novelty, said Ariel Levenson, an English teacher at the Dalton School on
Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Holden’s home turf. She added that even the
students who liked the book tend to find the language — “phony,” “her hands
were lousy with rocks,” the relentless “goddams” — grating and dated.“Holden Caulfield is supposed to be this
paradigmatic teenager we can all relate to, but we don’t really speak this way
or talk about these things,” Ms. Levenson said, summarizing a typical response.
At the public charter school where she used to teach, she
said, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich
kid with a weekend free in New York City.’ ”Julie Johnson, who taught Mr. Salinger’s
novel over three decades at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., cited
similar reactions. “Holden’s passivity is especially galling and perplexing to
many present-day students,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “In general, they
do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes; they are more focused on
distinguishing themselves in society as it is presently constituted than in trying
to change it.”Of course, Holden has always had his
detractors. Harcourt Brace, the publishing house that originally solicited “The
Catcher in the Rye,” turned it down, saying it wasn’t clear whether Holden was
supposed to be crazy. Later, highbrow critics like Joan Didion and George Steiner mocked his
moral shallowness and “relatability.”But Holden won over the young, especially
the 1960s generation who saw themselves in the disaffected preppy, according to
the cultural critic Morris Dickstein. “The skepticism, the belief in the purity
of the soul against the tawdry, trashy culture plays very well in the
counterculture and post-counterculture generation,” said Mr. Dickstein, who
teaches at the Graduate Center of the University of the City of New York.
Today, “I wouldn’t say we have a more gullible youth culture, but it may be
more of a joining or togetherness culture.”The culture is also more competitive. These
days, teenagers seem more interested in getting into Harvard than in flunking
out of Pencey Prep. Young people, with their compulsive text-messaging and
hyperactive pop culture metabolism, are more enchanted by wide-eyed, quidditch-playing Harry Potter of Hogwarts than by the smirking
manager of Pencey’s fencing team (who was lame enough to lose the team’s
equipment on the subway, after all). Today’s pop culture heroes, it seems, are
the nerds who conquer the world — like Harry — not the beautiful losers who
reject it.Perhaps Holden would not have felt quite so
alone if he were growing up today. After all, Mr. Salinger was writing long
before the rise of a multibillion-dollar cultural-entertainment complex largely
catering to the taste of teenage boys. These days, adults may lament the
slasher movies and dumb sex comedies that have taken over the multiplex, but
back then teenagers found themselves stranded between adult things and childish
pleasures.As Stephanie Savage, an executive producer
of the "Gossip Girl" television series, told National Public Radio last year, in Holden’s
world “you can either go to the carousel in Central Park, or you can choose the
Wicker Bar. You can have a skating date, or you can have a prostitute come up
to your hotel room. There’s really not that sense of teen culture that there is
now.”Some critics say that if Holden is less popular
these days, the fault lies with our own impatience with the idea of a lifelong
quest for identity and meaning that Holden represents.Barbara Feinberg, an expert on children’s literature
who has observed numerous class discussions of “Catcher,” pointed to a story
about a Holden-loving loser in the Onion headlined “Search for Self Called Off
After 38 Years.”“Holden is somewhat a victim of the current
trend in applying ever more mechanistic approaches to understanding human
behavior,” Ms. Feinberg wrote in an e-mail message. “Compared to the early
1950s, there is not as much room for the adolescent search, for intuition, for
empathy, for the mystery of the unconscious and the deliverance made possible
through talking to another person.”Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from
Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted
to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’”
Catcher in the Rye? Couldn't get past chapter 2
Is the classic novel losing its appeal among young readers? Also, young people still read?