Books of 2008, Part IV

Earlier today I finished The Catcher In the Rye, J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage alienation. Unlike most high school students in this country, I somehow got out of reading this one in school; I'm guessing the profanity had something to do with it.

Anyway, I'd never read it before. For those of you who, like me, somehow avoided it all these years, the story centers around Holden Caulfield, a directionless, depressed 16-year-old who has just been expelled from his fancy prep school and must now figure out what he wants to do with his life.

I nearly dropped out of college after my first semester, due to lousy grades and a general sense that I wasn't smart enough to figure out what to do about it. I've since learned that a great many smart kids do poorly their first years in college, due to a lack of experience with having to study. (That was definitely my problem.) The thing is, I can remember getting my crappy grades, and thinking, well, that's it, I'm too stupid for college. The idea that I was going to have to stay at whatever crappy job I had then, or choose from other similarly crappy jobs, for the rest of my career, was utterly demoralizing.

In that regard I was able to sympathize with Holden's dilemma. He was smart enough to see through all the BS inherent in school--especially high school--and he was aware enough of his intelligence to keep him from being humble enough to deal with it. Reading this book brought back some of that dread, some of that "well what now?" feeling that brought a cold lump of fear to my stomach even back then. As such, it was hard to get through it--it's depressing, and Holden isn't a particularly likable person.

I can see, though, why it's stood the test of time over all these years, as well as why it's been challenged and banned and whined about by uptight parents all that time. There's a day that comes at least once for just about all of us where we need to decide where to go, and why. It can be hard to remember that you're not the only one to be faced with these questions.