There’s an internet debate a’brewin’ over the merits of that perennial high school syllabus placeholder The Catcher in the Rye. Over at Good Magazine, Anne Trubek makes an impassioned plea to replace it with something newer and fresher:
J.D. Salinger’s novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger’s novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.
Meanwhile, the scribes at Gawker have responded with an equally impassioned WTF? directed at Trubek:
My initial reaction to this would be that we read Catcher in The Rye because everyone on some level at some point loves Catcher in The Rye, and we are fast running out of things we can say that about.
I don’t love Catcher in the Rye. In fact, I think it’s quite frankly one of the worst books I’ve ever read, and I’ve read the novelization of Star Trek VI. I even went and reread it after a decade, in case I just wasn’t ready for it the first time. And I hated it even more. I think it’s popular because it gives us permission to moan and whine when we realize life isn’t fair, without insisting that we take any real action, something most of us would love to hear as adolescents.
I remembmer passing the book back and forth during math class. The teacher–a young woman from one of the Seven Sister exclusive women colleges of the time–gave us an in-class assignment and read it while we worked. It was a door opening for me, onto a world of audacious observations about adults.
But that was long ago, and when I tried to get my kids to read it (they went to French schools and it wasn’t in the syllabus) neither were interested. Whether that was because it was being pushed by Mom, because they grew up in Quebec, or justchanging times, I don’t know. But I iremember thinking that maybe the best books need to be discovered by kids themselves for them to fully appreciate them.
BTW when my daughter was about 13 and too sick with some virus to read herself, I started to read Emma to her. She stopped me after a few pages because she thought the characters were all “snobs” and she wasn’t interested in what happened to them. Some truth there, too.
Mary
I love this book. I just read it this past year and I think it is relevant in any time period. I wish I would have been required to read it when I was in school. I am just lucky that a friend recommended it read it this year. It was the perfect setting for me. I live in New York City and read it while winter was in full swing here. I even fell in love with a song a band called runaway dorothy does called Caulfield.