I mean, I really hate this book. It's brilliantly written; it perfectly captures the sense of anguish, alienation, and disillusionment that many of us experience as teenagers. In that sense, it is a brilliant success as a novel. But I detest it (and its female version, The Bell Jar). As Jessica Roake puts it, Catcher stands for the proposition that "the moody sensitivity of teenagers is actually...the correct reaction to the world." Holden Caulfield's angiush is ultimately presented to us as an end in itself, as a specimen of life. In the anti-hero genre of which it became such a symbol, this naturalistic approach was considered a virtue--and, again, it accomplishes this purpose as brilliantly as any novel ever could, I think. It's a haunting classic that sticks with you. But it sticks with you like a sickening sense of hopelessness in a "world I never made." And that is why it is such a godawful betrayal.
Teenagers don't need to be told that there is phoniness and loneliness and emptiness in the world. They don't need to be told that pain and suffering and unrequited love are commonplaces and that the adults they once looked to for shelter and comfort are often unable or unwilling to help. What teenagers need to be told is that there is something out there that is better and that is possible. They need to be told not to throw away the hero in their souls. They need to be shown, even if just for an instant, a brilliant, sunlit alternative: a world of joy and success and achievement that is within their grasp if they will commit themselves to it. For myself, I found it in The Fountainhead, and in the 25th anniversary introduction Rand wrote for it, she put it beautifully; indeed, it is my favorite thing she ever wrote:
It is not in the nature of man—nor of any living entity—to start out by giving up, by spitting in one’s own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one’s mind; security, of abandoning one’s values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.
And instead, they are handed a copy of Catcher in The Rye, a book that says that when you feel you've run up against a door you cannot open...well, there's nothing on the other side anyway. A book that says that heroism is a sham, and that want, that agony, is really all they can expect. What's most pathetic about this--as Nietzsche, who for all his faults transcended that sense of emptiness, said--is that it's all just so sadly immature. (That sense of bleak disillusionment that you think makes you so sophisticated? It's pathetic. Those of us who have seen the dawn on the other side are secretly laughing at you.)
I hope young, beautiful souls, many of them teetering on the edges of their future personalities, find something like what I found in The Fountainhead. I don't know if Black Swan Green is like this; if it does as Roake says it does. She says "while Catcher in the Rye is, in many ways, the story of a breakdown, Black Swan Green is truly a coming-of-age novel, the story of a young writer’s ascendance. Jason discovers the power and the comfort of words, and is saved through his ability to make sense of his world through writing." I hope that's true.
HT: Virginia Postrel
Comments policy