Book Club Monday: The Catcher in the Rye

Author: J. D. Salinger Title: The Catcher in the Rye Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Date Published: 07/16/1951

Read Dates: 11/05/2025- 11/09/2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫

This was my book club pick for November.

The Catcher in the Rye is a single POV coming-of-age story that follows Holden Caulfield. Holden is on the verge of being kicked out of yet another school and, not wanting to go home and face his parents' disappointment, ends up wandering New York City for a few days. He's depressed and alienated, and spends two mostly sleepless days exploring the city and seeking out connections with strangers and old acquaintances alike.

It is so hard to rate the classics, and strange to revisit one I read and loved as a teenager. I remembered it being a story about a teenage boy going crazy, but re-reading it, I don't see insanity so much as a slightly obsessive mind and a tendency towards depression. Seeing as these are traits I have (and have had since I was younger than Holden!), it was a bit disconcerting revisiting the story and being reminded that it was told by Holden as he is currently in a psychiatric facility of some kind. More than anything, it feels like a somewhat normal teenage experience (feeling misunderstood and afraid to face the consequences of your mistakes) and an indictment of mental health treatment in the 1950s!

It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.