The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
My rating: 2.5 / 3
Holden Caulfield, what can I say? Holden is our narrator, and he is a messed up kid (17) who hates everything. He’s being kicked out of (yet another) boarding school, and is pretty whiny.
I have to say, I was really hoping for more out of this book. I mean, it’s supposed to be a classic, but I just don’t get it. To mimic Holden, what was the *goddamn* point??
Holden leaves school days early, goes out to bars where he is drinking despite being under age, checks into a hotel, and basically goes “underground” in NYC for a few days. Why didn’t the school notice he was he was missing and call his parents?
He goes on and on about how he hates phonies, but I think Holden was the biggest phony of all. He is constantly saying how much he hates something yet doing it anyway. He lies to his friends (if you can call them that), he lies to the girls he’s sort of dating.
Someone told me it was “more of a guy story”. Um, I read sci-fi, fantasy, horror, you name it. I work in a technical field, I play video games. I can hang with the boys, if you will. I do not think that this is just a guy’s story. I think it’s a poor excuse for a classic american novel and was quite a waste of my time. The only reason I finished it was because I was waiting for something, anything, interesting to happen.
There is nothing eventful in this novel. There is no transformation, no climax, no character progression or growth. Hell, nothing very interesting happens AT ALL.