That was then. This is half a century later. "The Catcher in the Rye" is now, you'll be told just about anywhere you ask, an "American classic," right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading "The Catcher in the Rye" after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.
Agreed. Somehow I missed this reassessment of Salinger's novel when it was published in the Washington Post eleven years ago. Ha!
What a pleasure to read it tonight.
I never liked the book. I thought the prose was contrived and, well, phony. The narrator's first-person voice never cut it for me. There was no kid there.
I think Salinger was a master short story writer, but CITR really did suck. We should all write a bad novel and get rich.
TS
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