The Only Game in Town: "Holden" Onto the Past

When it was first published in the early 1980s, Bret Easton Ellis' Less than Zero was dubbed "Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation" by that all-knowing literary oracle USA Today (snark). Similarly, DBC Pierre's 2003 Booker Award-winning debut Vernon God Little was panned by one well-known British professor, saying it was "Catcher in the Rye with none of the sensitivity." And just last week, YA author Eireann Corrigan found herself pacing her apartment nervously after discovering that Kirkus Reviews had directly compared the protagonist of her forthcoming novel, Ordinary Ghosts, to J.D. Salinger's archetypical angry young man."When someone compares your work to Catcher, it's either high praise or total dismissal," says Corrigan. "There's not a lot in between."

The unfortunate fact is that literary reading, particularly among young adults, is on the serous decline. In reading the above reviews, I can't help but think that it has something to do with our literary culture's inability to move past Catcher in the Rye and see the intrinsic value in modern literature — not as a comparison to the texts in the agreed-upon literary canon, but as something of a New Canon. And I'm further wondering if, now sixty years after he first appeared in print, Holden Caulfield should finally retire from the literary game.

The idea first came to me last week while talking to The Every Boy author Dana Adam Shapiro for our Gather interview. As his novel is partially narrated by a 15-year-old, our conversation naturally drifted in the direction of young-adult literature. I asked if he considered his novel of the teen/YA genre — Shapiro asked me in return, "I don't know, was Catcher a YA book?"

If there was such a category as "YA literature" in 1951 when Catcher was first published — or even if the novel were published today — it is possible that Salinger would have been touring high school classrooms and not college lecture halls. Or it's possible that a savvy Little, Brown editor might have seen Catcher's potential as an adult hardcover bestseller and packaged it accordingly. Regardless of its classification, the novel is undoubtedly one of modern education's favorite go-to books for teens who want to read about teens. And when I was a high school sophomore in 1994-95, and again when I taught high school English from 2001-03, Catcher was on the top of my syllabus. Corrigan, a teacher in New Jersey, told me in an email, "If there's one book that resonates with about 95% of my kids, it's Catcher in the Rye." What I'm left to wonder is this: is it because it's really the best novel ever written about (and for) teens, or is it because the educational system has embraced it (and only it) as the teen-focused novel to teach?

By now, Holden is in his 80s. Having never had the benefit of revising or revisiting his narrative, the Holden we have come to know and love knows nothing of such seminal 20^th Century events as the Lunar Landing, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, or The Cold War. He knows nothing of the nuclear proliferation that occurred after his "birth" in a 1945 issue of Colliers, nor has he ever changed the channel on a television using a remote control (or a "Lazy Bones" as it would have been called in his later days). Though I would never claim that Holden doesn't adequately express teenage angst and confusion in his narrative, I will say this: the angst and confusion he expresses is certainly not that of today's teen reader.

As adults, we can differentiate, we can extrapolate, and we can appreciate. We can decipher Holden's struggles and see them as our own, or make comparisons to how it is — or might be — relevant to 2007. But high school students are still unarguably in the nascent stages of their literary lives — though they have been reading for 10 years, they are just beginning to read and evaluate what we might call "literature." And according to the Reading at Risk study conducted by the NEA in 2004, reading among young adults is dropping off at astonishing rates — nearing 28% among some of the youngest measured age groups.

Of course, when confronted with the facts, we turn to easy scapegoats to blame for our children's literary decline: Nintendo Wii, cell phones, MySpace, iPods and all those other socially disruptive technologies. I don't blame Holden for not knowing what a cell phone is, or how it has changed the way kids communicate. Nor do I blame him for never having logged on MySpace (or Gather, for that matter) to vent his frustrations and network with other teens that have experienced the same problems. I also don't blame teens for choosing two hours of PlayStation over 60 pages of Dickens (I made the same choice myself this weekend, and I have no regrets). Who I blame here is an educational system that refuses to supplement (or, God forbid, replace) Holden with a more relevant, more modern angsty teen — one who knows what it's like to fear 9/11-style terrorism, and who can be reached on his or her SideKick should anything happen to anyone, anywhere in the world.

At some point in the latter half of the 20^th Century, our schools introduced Catcher in the Rye in place of whatever now-obsolete text they were formerly using to teach teens about teens. But maybe Holden Caulfield simply being sixteen isn't enough for young readers to relate to anymore — especially considering that technology, communication, and media are changing much more rapidly now than they did fifty (or even fifteen) years ago. I believe it is time for more modern literary figures — like Henry Every, Vernon G. Little, and Emil Simon — to once again give relevance to the young-adult literary experience and make reading a priority (not a chore) for teens.

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Chris Steib is the editor in chief of Void magazine, and can be reached at steib@voidmagazine.com. His Gather column, "The Only Game in Town" (AKA: The Game), focuses on emerging trends in the publishing industry and assorted other book- and writing-related miscellany. Catcher in the Rye is one of his all-time favorite books.