At the end of World War two, in Pennsylvania
USA, Holden Caulfield is at Pencey Prep School, but not for much longer. This
is his account of the night he walked out and how he spent the following few
days.
He is due to get expelled at the end of term
but he doesn’t give a toss, and decides to take off early (before the letter
home reaches his parents) and head for New York and just “take it easy for a
few days” before heading home.
Easy doesn’t come easy to Holden;
aggravation does. He gets into a scuffle before he even leaves the college,
then once in the Big Apple he has bother with cabbies, barmen, an
ex-girlfriend, and even a prostitute and her pimp.
Through it all we get his commentary on
events, coloured by some back history details. In his version everyone else is
a “phoney” while he is merely being himself - obnoxious, pretentious or honest
but misunderstood? Is his behaviour a cry for help, a desperate search for an
anchor to halt his hedonistic, self-destructive drift – a catcher in the rye to
stop him going over the cliff?
The writing is convincingly smart-arsed
adolescent and to me portrays well a loner who really wants to belong but can’t
dissemble the way society demands. If I had read it (as I should have) in my
late teens I may have been able to identify more with Holden Caulfield, but now
in my dotage I just wanted to give him a shake and tell him to get over himself.
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