39. Catcher In The Rye: JD Salinger’s American Rebel

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3:15Daddy's going to kill you. He's going to kill you, she said. I wasn't listening, though. I was thinking about something else, something crazy. You know what I'd like to be? I mean, if I had my goddamn choice. What? Stop swearing. You know what I'd like to be? I mean, if I had my goddamn choice. What? Stop swearing. You know that song, If a Body Catch a Body Coming Through the Rye? It's If a Body Meet a Body Coming Through the Rye. It's a poem by Robert Burns. I know it's a poem by Robert Burns. She was right, though. I thought it was if a body catch a body. Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids and nobody's

3:52around. Nobody big, I mean, except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody before they start to go over the cliff. I mean, if they're running and they don't look where they're going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's what I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. That was, of course, from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, published as a novel in 1951. And it's one of the most famous novels about youth, a coming of age novel, though whether it is or not, we'll discuss. It often appears on lists of the best novels of the 20th century. It's widely considered to be one of the greatest American

4:37novels ever written. And it's a school classic in England, but more particularly America. And it describes the alienation and disillusionment and also grief of Holden Caulfield, its 16-year-old protagonist and narrator. And Dominic, as a famous teen rebel yourself, did you read this when you were young and relate to it? Or is this your first time reading it? I first read this book actually when I was a teenager. It's one of those things, I don't know if other listeners have had this when you um you start idly flicking through a book and you get to about page 100 you know you're just kind of idly looking you start reading and then you end up reading the whole thing but you miss out like i'd actually never read the fact the first 50 or

5:17100 pages no way because i just sort of flicked through it in in the school library have you read this before tabby yeah so i did it for my gcses and i actually remember loving it i i was i really liked holden who i who i find to be a genuinely interesting character you said quite rightly it is a very powerful window into 1950s america and more specifically new york most of the book is set in New York. The American writer and essayist Adam Gopnik wrote, no book has ever captured a city better than Catcher in the Rye captured New York in the 50s. Wow. Which is a big statement. Basically, this is the first, I mean, maybe some listeners will be able to think of earlier examples, but this is the first moment in history when teenage alienation is a big kind of cultural theme. And I think that's

6:08actually linked to the invention of mass youth culture and the idea of the teenager. So Holden Caulfield becomes a kind of touchstone, doesn't he, in the 1950s. So certainly by the end of the decade, when is this published? 1951. So certainly by about, by the late 50s, Holden Caulfield is kind of a shorthand for teenage rebellion, somebody who's disaffected, somebody who doesn't accept the expectations of their society, their parents, their teachers, and so on. And, you know, there have always been adolescents in literature and in culture. I think what this book absolutely reflects, I mean, this is actually quite a sort of banal point to make, is the creation, the popularization of the idea of the teenager. And actually, when you look at the teenager, the word, I think the first uses

6:57of the word teenager have been traced back to the 1910s or 1920s in newspapers. But really, it was taken up in the 30s as a marketing slogan so basically what you had was for the first time in history you had young people aged let's say 16 17 18 with a disposable income that they wanted to spend on things that would mark them out as distinctive so they're buying you know chewing gum bicycles motorbikes records records obviously in particular clothes different fashions. They're not dressing like their parents. Yeah, they're like a distinctive unit for the first time, aren't they? I think up to that point, a teenager, 16 or 17, 18 year old had been a little adult. And people had accepted, you know, there's a sort of gray area, but you became a little adult quite

7:38quickly. I think this is the first point in history where you have, I think they dress differently. Music is obviously very important, but also the way they speak, the slang. And this is the first point in history where you have, I think they dress differently. Music is obviously very important, but also the way they speak, the slang. And this is obviously one of the defining qualities of the Catra and the Rye, is Holden's very, very distinctive voice. It's the beginning of such a big concept we are so familiar with today. The idea of disaffected, slightly depressed, disenchanted youth. But that was not the case at this time was it as i say teens often had this they were kind of jolly as you know and then

8:11you got this idea of the teen rebel the james deans or whatever it would be i'm really struggling actually to think of examples in victorian or early 20th century literature of characters age 17 who are miserable and disaffected and who are not just comical. If they appear at all, they might be kind of comical supporting characters, but by and large, they're on the margins. This is the first time that he has been given a voice himself. And the book really leans into his contempt for the phoniness and the inauthenticity and the hollowness of the adult world. I think that is what is groundbreaking about the book. So he's 16 years old. He is immortalized for this very famous hat that he wears. It's a red deer hunter and he's devoted

8:58to it and he likes to wear it back to front. Looks wise, he's compared at one point to an actor. This woman says, oh, you remind me of some actor, and people think it's probably Freddie Bartholomew, who was a child actor from the 1930s. He runs away from his prep school in Pennsylvania after being expelled just before the Christmas holidays after a couple of scuffles with his roommates. And then he restlessly moves around New York. He drinks, he talks to people, he dances, he smokes his way through a couple of days there. He hires and then sends away a prostitute. He sneaks into his parents' apartment to get some money and speaks to his younger sister, Phoebe. He breaks down in tears. He goes to see a former English teacher that he admired, and there's a slightly sinister

9:41interaction there. He thinks about a lot throughout the book actually about his former neighbor and I think crush Jane Gallagher and also his younger brother Ali who has died before the events of the novel and then Holden decides to run away again he meets Phoebe at the Met to say goodbye and then when she tries to run away with him and and he won't let her he takes her to the zoo to kind of make her happy so that she's not too upset about his leaving. And he watches her on the carousel in the rain. And then what happens after that is kind of, it's only really loosely implied. It's not really the point. Our expectation or our assumption is that he has ended up in a sanatorium of some kind, isn't it?

10:23Yes, yeah. But you get the sense that he meets up with his parents.atorium of some kind, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. But you get the sense that he meets up with his parents. He's potentially going to go back to school. It's not entirely negative. But where did Holden come from? Well, J.D. Salinger himself said that he was loosely based on himself as a boy and that the whole book was sort of autobiographical. So let's meet Jerome David Salinger because he is an intriguing figure. And also he's very well known, I would say culturally, because he is thought of as a recluse. He hid himself away for so long. And so there's a mystique. So he was born in Manhattan in 1919. He's from a Lithuanian family, Lithuanian Jews.

11:06They were upwardly mobile, weren't they? They were becoming respectable. They were a classic story of a sort of, an originally an immigrant family who were on the way up and were trying to turn themselves into Americans. They started living in kind of waspy parts of New York. Yes. So a good example of Sandler's own life, he starts off going to public schools, then he ends up going to a prestigious private school called McBurney. And this is in the 30s. Salinger doesn't really fit in. He feels sort of slightly disaffected and alienated. He calls himself Jerry so that he will sound like everybody else. He got kicked out after two years for not trying. So all very Holden. He gets sent to a military academy

11:45called Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, and there he writes stories under the bedclothes at night. So that's the origins of his life as a writer. But he's not a great academic star by any means. In fact, they said he was mediocre. The only slightly above average IQ school. But that school is probably the inspiration for the school in The Catcher in the Rye that Holden leaves, Pensy Prep. Right. So he went to New York University. He only lasted a year. He went travelling in Europe to learn about the food trade, the luxury food imports business. He, again, doesn't quite find himself. He doesn't care about much. No. That's the care about much. No. That's the sense you get. Extraordinary to think that he's actually in Europe.

12:29You know, he's in Vienna a month before the Anschluss. Yeah. And actually, as somebody with a Jewish background, he would have been vulnerable in that environment. And he seemed uninterested in all of that. Didn't really bother him. Classic teenager. So he comes back. He has another unhappy term at a different college in Pennsylvania. So he's really living the Holden Caulfield experience. And then he goes to New York and he enrolls at Columbia, does a course there. And he's taught a writing course by a guy called Witt Burnett, who edits a magazine called Story, which specializes in short stories, short fiction. And this guy Burnett, he's a talent spotter. He's very good at discovering up and coming writers.

13:11He encourages Salinger. And Salinger, basically after a slow start, sort of explodes into life and starts publishing his work in magazines. And one of the things that he's writing about from the very beginning, actually, writers often write about themselves. And he's writing about aimless, slightly alienated young men. Yeah. So by the time he's 21, he'd managed to get stories accepted by Esquire and the New Yorker. And New Yorker was his kind of holy grail. That's what he really wanted to work for. And those stories were about an estranged teenager called Holden Caulfield. So he has the name. But the difference is that in those stories, Holden is nervous about the war. This is his piece for the New Yorker. So Salinger's

13:52wartime experiences, he was drafted into the army as a counterintelligence agent. And at first, he had a fairly easy time until about 1944, actually, moving around US army bases. And then in March 1944, Salinger's shipped to Tiverton in Devon in preparation for the Normandy invasion. I think that's so interesting that he writes this in the build-up to D-Day. And it could not seem more different in tone. I know, but I think, I guess he's drawing on a different part of his life and he hasn't yet been that damaged by the war. Right. Okay. Yeah. Because you think this really damaged him, the war. Do you? I do. Yeah, I do. Towards the end of the war, he was there when they started liberating the sub camps of Dachau, the Dachau concentration camp system. And that was obviously totally

14:41harrowing. Do you think this finds its way into the Catcher in the Rye? I mean, Catcher in the Rye does not seem a book even remotely connected with the Second World War. But do you think some of the anger and alienation reflects Salinger's own experiences in the war? A lot of critics and commentators have made the connection. It would give you a slightly pessimistic view of human nature, wouldn't it, of the world going through something like that. The concentration camps. I mean, that's surely like dented people's views of the world. Like even now it's shaped the way that we see what humans are capable of. I mean, part of this you can probably see reflected in his spiritual quest. So first

15:19of all, he gets into a Zen Buddhism, doesn't he? And when he went on dates, he would give people his dates reading lists about Zen Buddhism. Oh God, be still my beating loins. I respect that. Oh, wow. You know what? I'm full of respect. He goes to Germany to do a period of denazification, not obviously for himself. And there he meets this woman, Sylvia Welter, and he marries her after only a few weeks. And his second wife, Margaret's mother, Claire, said that according to Salinger, Sylvia turned out to be an evil woman who genuinely hated Jews, was genuinely anti-Semitic. So the couple moved back to the US in 1946. Unsurprisingly, the marriage collapses. Right. He tries to resume life as a writer.

16:06This bloke, Whit Burnett, helps him to put together a collection of short stories, which is going to be called Young Folks. And this is obviously, again, the emphasis on youth. But Salinger can't get a publisher. He says this is all Burnett's fault. They fall out. In 1947, he gets back in with the New Yorker, doesn't he? And then he's off and running, really. He starts publishing Salinger almost exclusively for the New Yorker. And then he decided to set himself the challenge of developing all these sketches he'd been doing for years, these kind of chapters he'd written about this guy, Holden Caulfield, into a fully-fledged novel. His agent at the manuscript to Little Brown and Company, and they published it as a full-length novel in 1951.

16:50The publication caused a sensation. Salinger did not like this. He avoided it mainly by spending a lot of his time in England because he didn't want to do interviews. He didn't like public appearances. And he also hated reading reviews. So before we close, we tie up Salinger's story, let's discuss a little bit how the book was received, because it was quite polarizing. Yes, it was an instant commercial hit, and it was adored by general readers. It made it onto the New York Times bestseller list for 30 weeks. And it was selected book of the month. It hit an immediate chord with many. It was reprinted eight times within two months of publication. But as I say, you know, it's Marmite. Instantly, it's Marmite.

17:32Either kind of adoring, you've changed my life sort of a reaction, or it's Ruth Leslie Lambasted. You can find loads of people who say The Catcher in the Rye changed my life. It's the first book I read. It's almost the book I read that led me into the adult world or led me into a new way of writing. So this is Elizabeth Frank. She said, Holden Caulfield was a champion of bad words and cutting school and pointing out the dreariness and the hypocrisy of that era. I remain grateful to Holden Caulfield and The Catcher in the Rye for helping us put a name to all those intuitions we had that something was terribly wrong with civilization in America at that time. There's definitely a mood, a cultural mood in the 1950s and then of course in the 60s,

18:15which is very critical of kind of conservative America, of the nuclear family, of what is seen as the repressive, stuffy, conformist, suffocating world of kind of, you know, the sort of madmen world, I suppose, which youngsters reject. So much of the reaction to The Catcher in the Rye, though, is bound up with Holden Corford. Of course, he tells us the story. But I think when people tell us they love the book, what they really mean is they love him and his persona. And lots of people would say, you know, it's, I believe that he really exists. He speaks to me. I mean, some of the people who like the book completely expected, say Marlon Brando, obviously he's playing a rebel. Jack Nicholson, obviously, you know,

18:57he's a sort of, again, perceived as a sort of rebellious figure, someone who plays rebellious, interesting figures. But President George H.W. Bush, who's like the ultimate establishment person. But on the other hand, Holden does go to an elite boarding school. Oh, that blew my mind because he said something like it was his Bible. I was like, was it? Yeah, but even people who seem very boring and very stuffy, you know, they've had a period of teenage rebellion. I mean, everyone's been a teenager, Tabby. Were you? I know you find this inconceivable. Yeah. On the other hand, there are people who don't like it. So as you already said, the New Yorker, where Salinger often published, they dismissed it as exhibitionistic.

19:39There were critics who said it felt amateurish, that it didn't feel professionally put together. There were a lot of people who were shocked by it, who said, you know, they're swearing, Holden is a teenage drinker and smoker and all of this, the stuff with the prostitute, his obsession with sex, all of these things are inappropriate in a book for younger readers. Of course, actually, it was meant to be a book for adults. But by and large, this is a book that you read between the ages of 13 and 25, let's say. I mean, you wouldn't see somebody reading this book at the age of 52, would you, by and large? No, no. So lots of libraries, particularly within sort of more conservative areas, didn't like it. It was the most censored

20:26book in high schools in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. And yet the paradox, it becomes a staple of school reading lists. So if you have a sort of slightly more progressively minded English teacher, and the year is 1983 and you're 16 years old, your English teacher gives you this book to read because they think it will speak to you. And the controversy actually has never quite gone away. So even in the 2000s, still one of the most challenged books on kind of school curriculums in America. And of course, there is this issue about whether it's any good. So Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post critic in 2004, why do English teachers whose responsibility is to teach good writing repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?

21:16I mean, that's pretty damning. He compared it to drinking castor oil, which I think is a bit harsh to be honest. Oh, that's harsh. Either way, good or bad, there's a lot of public attention around this book. It's a bit of a furore. And as we've already said, J.D. Salinger hated this. As his notoriety and popularity grew, he retreated more and more from the public eye. Meanwhile, his personal life is a bit bonkers. So he married again. He married a 19-year-old Harvard graduate called Claire Douglas. They had two children he's all in on his macrobiotic diets and his eastern religions and he's quite dogmatic about it very dogmatic he's very reclusive by the 1960s uh he basically is not giving any interviews he and claire get divorced 1967 she's on the verge of a breakdown

22:03he then has a series of relationships with women who are quite a bit younger. So one of them was 18. She was Joyce Maynard. She wrote a very controversial memoir about him and about their time together in 1999. And she sort of portrayed him, didn't she, as controlling and abusive. Bit of a monster, yeah. Finally, to cap it all, his daughter Margaret, so this is from his second marriage, she wrote a memoir, didn't she, in 2000, which was very, again, very controversial. It really paints him as a bit of a villain. You know, she says her upbringing was very difficult. She said her father was paranoid, controlling, again, emotionally abusive. She goes into detail about his strange spiritual medical habits,

22:44said it was like growing up in a cult said he drank his own urine and would sometimes kind of try to speak in tongues when he went into a particular state the more i hear about it and tabby the more i think he sounds like quite hard work wait till you find out about his diet even later in life but i mean understandably i think i still think this is sad no matter no matter what you know by the end of his life he's basically living in almost complete isolation he's living But I mean, understandably, I still think this is sad no matter what. By the end of his life, he's basically living in almost complete isolation. He's living on frozen peas and uncooked lamb patties. But Salinger eventually died on the 27th of January, 2010, at the age of 91.

23:22To go back to The Catcher in the Rye, it's a more literary book than people think. No question about that. The title comes from the Robert Burns poem, Coming Through the Rye. It's a more literary book than people think. No question about that. The title comes from the Robert Burns poem, Coming Through the Rye. It's actually quite a bawdy poem. It's a poem about basically love or sex in a meadow. Holden has misinterpreted the poem because he thinks it's meant to be about two people meeting and Holton thinks it's about one person catching another person. And when the second half we'll get into what he thinks the implications of catching somebody else are, what he's trying to prevent them from,

23:52because growing up, sexuality, adulthood, whatever. There's also, it clearly is in some way modeled on Huckleberry Finn, I think. People always, always draw the connection between these two novels first person narrator exactly the first line of huckleberry finn very very similar opening line so huckleberry finn says you don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of sounds like the first line of the catcher in the rye but there's no i mean there's no evidence of intentional but i mean surely he loved books writers but he was always very reluctant to talk about influences and inspirations i wonder if because he was quite a proud man maybe for instance in in 1951 william maxwell asked him what are your influences yeah and he was like well does that what

24:40are you asking me you ask me which books i love well i love kaf Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Keats, Bronte. So all the classics. He's not giving loads away, but actually in private letters, he has a particular penchant for F. Scott Fitzgerald. I can see how the Great Gatsby. Oh my God. I saw so many similarities. Like in many ways, I mean, Holden references the Great Gatsby in the book. And in many ways, similar themes, you know, disenchanted, youngish people who don't really fit into their societies gatsby and nick a loathing for fakeness yeah and of course hemingway i mean you're a massive hemingway devotee do you see a bit of hemingway in the prose would you say yeah i i do i do um that kind of colloquial, slangy, very American style of prose. But the big difference is

25:30that Holden Caulfield is the opposite of the ultra masculine leading men that Hemingway usually writes about. You know, he totally, totally takes that away from him. And I think he did that intentionally in Holden because Holden would not be a sympathetic character if he was this much more James Deeny teen rebel let's go to a break and then afterwards we will discuss Holden Caulfield himself and if that's not excitement enough we will explain why Leonardo DiCaprio never managed to get the film made but also we'll be answering the question did the Catcher in the rye actually inspire an assassination attempt on an American president? And how was it connected to the death of John Lennon? See you after the break.

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27:42Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com slash small business. Welcome back to the book club, everyone. Now, before we get back to the show, a reminder to join our own community, our own gang of disillusioned outcast rebels and sign up to book club notes. And if you do, I promise you, you'll never feel like a depressed, misanthropic teenager ever again. You'll feel great. Why would you feel so great? Well, because it's a weekly newsletter of talking points. So that's something to live for. Book recommendations. Now you're just high on life. And a whole bevy of insights from you, our listeners, because we are not like, you know, the institutions. We want to hear from you, you know, the people.

28:30And it's delivered into your inbox every Saturday morning, free. And how, Dominic, do you find this lifeline to a more glorious life? So I signed up at thebookclubhq.com and genuinely every Saturday, I feel like my weekend is empty until it lands in my inbox and then my weekend is sorted. Before I explode with excitement, let's get back to Catcher in the Rye. So as we've already said, it's a book with an extraordinary reputation after life, I think probably in part due to the mystique of its author. But it has also, I think it just genuinely in its own right does mean a lot or has come to mean a lot to a lot of people or has done in its life cycle for many reasons. You know, it's the idea of an ordinary young man going through this journey of alienation.

29:12But also, I think, because its style is so famous and so discussed. Holden is telling us the story in this confessional vein. And he speaks to the reader directly. We've had a few examples of this. So Humbert did it in Lolita. And of course, Jane Eyre does it in Charlotte Bronte's book back in 1847. So there's a sense in which, as with those books, this is a sort of an unfettered, if you can fetter a stream, you can't fetter a stream, but you know what I mean. An unfettered stream of consciousness in an informal style. So much more informal than those two examples, Lolita or Jane Eyre. And Holden will say to you at times quite colloquially, you may have heard of my pal so-and-so. You may be thinking this.

30:03I expect you want me to tell you about X, Y, or Z or whatever. The opening line is the classic example. So we mentioned the opening line of Huckleberry Finn before the break. This is, I mean, you can sense the influence of Huckleberry Finn in this line. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like. Now, I have to say that whatever you think of The Catcher in the Rye, that's an excellent first line. Oh, it's so good. It's so good. It creates an immediate connection between the reader and the narrator and the central character. Yeah. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know,

30:41it's very confident. It immediately establish establishes a bond but it also establishes holden's personality and tone yes and the key word is obviously lousy my lousy childhood the sort of slight world weariness the contempt for his own childhood the mockery about the form you know usually when people are telling you about their childhood let's say it is um a pip in great expectations or it's dav David Copperfield or something. Who's referenced in the first paragraph of the book. He is David Copperfield, absolutely. So if you take that as an example, David Copperfield or Pip in Great Expectations would never describe their childhood as lousy. They would never be dismissive about the story they're telling.

31:21The fact that Holden is dismissive immediately, I think, establishes that this is something completely different and a new kind of relationship, I guess, between the narrator and his material. But also there's that reluctance, which is so interesting. It's not often that you find a book where you're like, oh, you're almost pulling it out of him, obviously you're not. But it's the opposite of the Moby Dicks, or I don't know why I'm going with the nautical theme here, Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner or something, where the whole point of the novel is that he wants to tell you. He's unraveling the story for you. Holden's like, eh, all right then, fine. And I do think he genuinely does sound, he genuinely does, it's not shocking for us now,

32:01but it would have been then. He genuinely does sound like a teenager. And he's very complex. He's sometimes extremely unnecessarily judgmental. Sometimes he's self-knowing. He sounds lost. And his voice moves as thoughts would. Fast-paced, compulsive, inconsistent, much more so than even, say, Hemingway. And random streams of thought will be inspired by little things, a chair or whatever. What's interesting is that quite often when people are telling a story like this, there are some removed from the story. They've changed. They've developed over the... Yeah, they're looking back. Rebecca, for instance. Yeah, they're looking back. Holden is still very much himself. If we assume he's telling us this story from a sanatorium,

32:46as actually Humber Humber is in Lolita, he hasn't grown up since then. The Holden who tells us the story is the same Holden as the Holden who's experiencing all of these things, I would say. He's got the same slightly contemptuous, tired, cynical view of the world. Yeah, and so as you say, the Holden who's telling the story is still the Holden who would use this slang. He's not saying, oh God, you know, he's not Nick Buchanan. He's not Nick from The Greatest Batteries. My younger carefree youth or whatever, he's still using words. And the slang is such a famous part of this. So, for instance things like don't be so goddamn sore old phoebe actly kid phony crummy swell all make the voice intriguingly

33:33immature and also the fact that it's overused i think as a child so you know i said he says and all this and all that and all that you know or old ph, old Stradlater, old... That is how teenagers speak. They use the tick again and again and again. I mean, it's how so many of us speak today, to be honest, myself included. When they listen to these podcasts, they say, have you noticed that Dominic always says this or Tabby always says that? That's how Holden Caulfield speaks. And yet he has this wonderfully endearing quality of sounding like a young person who's trying to sound old beyond their years. I think that's quite a tough thing to pull off. He always speaks in hyperbole and exaggeration.

34:12Yeah, as teenagers do, actually. As teenagers do. And all of this, you know, for instance, we go back to that opening line, my lousy childhood. He's an extremely, I mean, you are, this is just Dominic Sambro, bingo. He's an extremely unreliable narrator for all of this. But the funny thing is, I was thinking about this. Is he an unreliable narrator? Because an unreliable narrator requires us... Yeah, you have to read between the lines, I guess. You have to read between the lines, but I don't feel you ever have to do that with Holden Caulfield. Yeah, there's a lot that he doesn't tell us, though, that we have to interpret through what he doesn't say. But I guess that in itself is honest. But for but for instance he says at one point I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in

34:48your life yes he does or he says that he's illiterate I'm quite illiterate then says but I read a lot he's obviously very well read he's obviously a very smart boy the fact that his English teacher has taken such a shine to him and the fact his teachers generally even though he's been kicked out for not doing any work and being just a massive pain his teachers clearly are quite fond of holden and take him seriously and he reads extensively i mean his his literary references are are tip-top david copfield david copfield um he mentions emily dickinson uh he mentions out of africa i don't know it is so broad but also but then but then just that lousy childhood thing everything that we learn about him and his life and those things only

35:30gradually revealed to us during the course of the book it doesn't sound like it was that lousy childhood we find out he's from quite a wealthy family his parents you know don't seem unsympathetic he's got a nice home yeah of course so was it lousy you know that's kind of what i mean by you know can we entirely trust him it's not that he's lying to us i don't think i think it's just that he has the prejudices of a teenager who feels hard done by completely and that's what i think if you're a cynical reader or a more if you yourself are a more world-weary reader, then you might read this and you say, he is an entitled, privileged, whiny, actually, you know, I don't find him unlikable, but I can see there's a lot of readers might,

36:13that they would say, God, massive first world problems, like you don't like your very expensive boarding school. Yeah, well, I mean, this is a good point. Let's talk about Holden, you know, what he's like. I think he's a very interesting character, and I love like. I think he's a very interesting character and I love, and I think he's a very eccentric character and I'm drawn to that in him. The hat. Yeah, it's just wearing a hat back to front and you're automatically just zany. I think to just, to declare him or to read him as simply a rebellious teenager is actually to do him a disservice. He is, as I said, he's made up of so many contradictions and he's quite mercurial. He's an old soul and yet he is irritatingly childish,

36:54just randomly jumps on people or, you know, teases them. I mean, he would be irritating to hang around, I think. Sometimes he's very compassionate, but selectively because he's also extremely judgmental at various points and actually can be brutally sc brutally scathing you know for instance when he meets these uh three young girls in a bar one night well they're young to they might be into us but to him they're older to him they're older yeah exactly um and they're sort of a very pretty one who he danced with for a bit and And he's also constantly, almost desperately trying to make conversation with people. But then one of them is perhaps less blessed in the looks department. And he says, I danced with them all, the whole three of them, one at a time.

37:34The one ugly one. Laverne wasn't too bad a dancer, but the other one, old Marty was murder. Old Marty was like dragging the Statue of Liberty around the floor. That's funny. Yeah, he's untethered in the things that he says. I mean, to be honest, I think that's exactly how teenage boys talk about girls. Yeah, it is. Teenage boys are brutal. And for instance, the critic Louis Menand describes him as a demon of verbal incision, which I think is absolutely true because he's very perceptive. He sees people's weaknesses and he just hones in on them. Which is actually quite, I think, a young person. I mean, not just teenagers, but children. Children will see, they'll say, what, the fat person, the stupid person,

38:15that person who always does this because they don't have the filter. Exactly. And they see things sometimes more clearly than adults do. And of course, children are sometimes not terribly compassionate about adults' weaknesses. But also, teenagers tend to be slightly less self-knowing. So obviously, Holden is desperate for companionship, but he's always alienating himself from other people and coming down hard on them. And equally, he comes down hard on everyone and actually the world in general because he sees it all as phony. But he's an enormous hypocrite himself because he is phony. He's called himself a terrific liar and he's changeable. And he is scathing about other people for trying to be something they're not,

38:56trying to affect a persona. So particularly the boys at his school, he's, as Louis Miron absolutely says, he sees right to the core of them and he mocks them for their pretensions or their affectations but holden himself is extremely affected i mean the whole thing of wearing that ridiculous hat backwards that's such a teenage thing that teenagers do to make themselves different or draw attention to themselves yeah all his kind of obsessive smoking or yeah he's mannered, but in a very recognisable adolescent way, I think. Now, you love all this, don't you, Tabby? And in fact, I have to say, you've written in the notes, in capital letters, the words, HE IS ME, of yourself, haven't you? What is this?

39:40Now, is this relation to being a massive hypocrite, to being affected and mannered, or is it something else all of the above it's all of it's all of the above now i i like that he is a character made up of many things i'm so i think it makes him all his eccentricities make him seem more vulnerable his mood swings i like the way that he's tickled by odd things and he says oh god i just you know i love this or whatever i got high on that or whatever it is i like his always clumsy efforts to seem older this scene where he dances with his younger sister because he sees it as kind of authentic and and open and yes that's very sweet i agree with you and he also he's a reader that's what i mean i'm being harsh on you because that's

40:23actually the bit of him that you like most. That is the bit I like about him. Almost reluctantly, he throws these references out there. And I think also you see that he's actually very, very vulnerable and kind of on the verge of a nervous breakdown despite his glibness and his cynicism and apparent confidence. He's totally erratic. He's difficult and he is willful and he is often rude and you know he is um iconoclastic and all of this and he has this sort of glibness and he has this very heavily worn cynicism but actually beneath it all as the book goes on we begin to well quite early on actually i think we see that holden is actually a sad boy, that he's unhappy and that he is lonely, actually. He doesn't have a friend that he can really confide in.

41:15I mean, it's so telling that the person he does ultimately confide in, the person with whom he's got the strongest connection is his little sister, who clearly does understand him and sees she sees the child in like herself doesn't she we were talking weren't we before we recorded about the thing when he um he has a game that he plays where he pretends that he's been shot in the stomach and he's like a child playing i mean that's a really good example of playing a part of the thing that he does so often i think there's something deeper behind it though so you think this is basically he is wounded in a way and that's actually what this is that's what it's alluding to he's he's horsing around and this bar in new york playing

41:54the game pretending he's been shot but he says i didn't want anybody to know i was even wounded i was concealing the fact that i was a wounded son of a bitch and obviously he's not actually physically wounded but i think he i mean he obviously is deeply wounded deep down. He's grieving, as we will see. And he doesn't want anyone to know, you know, he doesn't want anyone around him to know that he is a wounded son of a bitch and he behaves like an idiot to hide it. And it also, I think, alienates him. He feels that he's the only one experiencing this pain. So he says he is the only guy with a bullet in his guts and the bullet in his guts it actually relates to the fact that he his younger brother ali before the beginning of the book has died of leukemia

42:38and that actually what holden is you know holden running away from school is perhaps not really so much about Holden's disaffection with school, but the fact that he doesn't know how to cope with his grief and his loneliness now that his brother has died. He's kind of running away from it. And he believes that the world around him just wouldn't get it. You know, that's also a very teen thing to think that your sadness, your your suffering your depression is yours no one else could ever be experiencing what you're experiencing um so he never says you know i'm grieving my brother ali but there are breadcrumbs that you know allow us to know it so i mean there's this endless sarcasm there's the fact that he let slip in a very casual way that just after Ali died, he broke the window of the family garage with his fist.

43:30You know, and he removes himself from that extreme action. He says, I pocketed my hand just for the hell of it, but my hand was a bastard. I hardly didn't even know I was doing it. And I didn't even know I had the goddamn windows broken until it was all over. So he's making it seem like it wasn't him. That was some other guy. You know, he's separating himself from this wounded, damaged person who's so broken that they break things. And so telling. The one thing he carries with him is Ali's old baseball glove, isn't it? Which Ali wrote poems on. Hold holds and clings on i mean that's his great memory of ali and it's a very that's i think that's a lovely detail actually really touching detail and he sees it as a symptom of ali's authenticity because ali would would

44:17when he was bored in the field playing baseball he'd read the poems on it you know rather than being you know a gung-ho boy who really gets into the game he's kind of standing on the side dreamily reading poems and that's the first real giveaway is holden starts writing a piece of creative writing for his roommate and he just ends up writing it all about this glove so clearly it's pouring out of him it's like the blood of those wounds is just gushing out of him and he doesn't see ali as someone who belongs in the past i think this is so telling he always talks about him in the present tense doesn't he totally so phoebe says to him at one point ali is dead and he says i know he's dead do you think i don't you think i know that i can still like him though can't i

44:57just because somebody's dead you don't just stop liking them for god's sake especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that are alive and all. And that is, I mean, that's one of the most, I think the moments in the book where the real Holden Caulfield, as it were, is speaking most clearly. Also, I mean, not to overdo that theme, but children also do that. For instance, if they have one parent that tends to be quite absent, they idealize and immortalize that parent rather than the parent that's with them yeah holden's reality is an unhappy one so he believes that the only good thing could be the guy that's not part of it that's gone yeah that's that's very true ali is a presence for him an imaginary friend an imaginary

45:41companion he's very lonely holden walking the streets of new york and he would say every time i'd get to the end of a block i'd make believe i was talking to my brother ali i would say to him ali don't let me disappear ali don't let me disappear ali don't let me disappear please ali and then when i'd reach the other side of the street without disappearing i would thank him i mean that's a very telling line the fear that he has of disappearing himself i guess of following his brother into oblivion and he's asking his brother for help. God, I think that's tragic. Now, this is, I think, a key part of the book. I know we agree about this, that actually, Ali is a child, and Ali is now frozen as a child in Holden's imagination. He is pure,

46:20unsullied by compromise, untainted by adolescence or adulthood and so much of what is driving holden is his grief not just for ali but for the impending disappearance of his own childhood and his innocence i would say probably the main theme of this book is Holden's fear of growing up. It's a very popular theme in fiction. It has always been Peter Pan, Little Women, Narnia, The Bell Jar. But I think that The Catcher in the Rye brilliantly and quite unusually captures, charters that very painful, hazy, strange, contradictory transitional period between childhood and adulthood and it shows that you know it's something fearful and the feeling you know the the vision of children becoming grown-ups is generally that they're reaching for it they're

47:19hungry for it they're like i want to go out drink i hate people belittling me you know whatever it may be though it's so funny how Tabby's definition of adulthood is drinking you know when you're a teenager and you're like stop calling me a child I'm an adult you're dying for independence yeah of course Holden's the opposite he's clinging to to the past like Gatsby you know he it's a reluctant thing for him it frightens him but you don't think that i find that psychologically very um plausible and uh i hate to use the word relatable because i think there is a point in your teenage life when you do mourn you know that you are you are losing your innocence i mean there's a sort of interesting point um um not to shed too

48:04much light into the sandbrook household that we have a bit ourselves about at what point does like your child's, a child's bedroom, for example, change from a child's bedroom to a teenager's bedroom. And there's a point when the kind of you, the parents sort of slightly sadly have to put away the teddy bears or the old books or whatever. And I think there are, I bet you, I bet there are loads of people listening to this who would say yeah actually that is a sad moment for the child too i remember being sad when i because i felt like i'd lost something that a chapter that had been so lovely and whatever it was closed i remember i remember i mean admittedly being quite a lot younger than holden thank god but i remember

48:39thinking to myself how much longer is it actually permissible for me to run around the garden in a cape, like pretending to be, I don't know, Frodo Baggins or whatever. Like at some point, this is going to have to end because they'll put me away. And I remember thinking that was a very sad realization. I think that is a sad. The loss of your childhood, if it's been a nice childhood, is always tinged with sadness. Of course course there's excitement and anticipation about the next step but that can be scary and so i mean that's why holden spends so much of the book his time in new york it's like a pilgrimage to his youth you know i mean he's always banging on about the ducks in the park because obviously he visited them as as

49:20a child and he goes and tries to find them but you know it's winter and there are no ducks it's part the reason he's so close to phoebe uh and it's also this theme explains the title of the novel yeah so we already said um in the robert burns poem it's if your body meets a body coming through the rye but holton has completely misinterpreted that he imagines himself standing in the field of rye and he imagines himself watching children playing near the edge of a cliff. And they're free, and they're carefree, and they're going to fall off the cliff. And he is going to catch them if they fall off the edge. And most people read this as Holden wants to stop them growing up, to stop them losing their

50:01innocence and losing the sort of beautiful naivety that you have when you're a child and to protect them from the process that he's going through because he sees the adult world as fundamentally inauthentic he can see how much adults themselves are playing parts and how much what hypocrites and compromise you know they are what compromises they make and so on and he i mean this word phony that's the worst insult if somebody is phony and he uses it again and again when somebody is being dishonest or corrupt or in fact if they're involved in some way with sex or sexuality so it's telling that almost all the adults we meet in the book he regards as phony in one way or another um his his they contrast them with ali who is not phony who is authentic and of course phoebe his

50:47younger sister phoebe is the one cat you know it's so it's very nicely observed i think that he he would never say a word in the book against phoebe phoebe is perfect their relationship is also a totally believable i think that of a older brother and a younger sister who is still kind of the kids yeah i mean he said he watches her sleeping i think this is a older brother and a younger sister who is still kind of the kids yeah I mean he said he watches her sleeping I think this is a nice scene he watches her sleeping her face is on the pillow she had her mouth way open it's funny you take adults they look lousy when they're asleep and they have their mouths way open but kids don't kids look all right I mean there you

51:18have it there's the sort of message of the book to some degree and he hates his contemporaries say at Pensey because he feels like their phoniness is born of the fact that they are trying too hard to become adults or rather they're just they are becoming adults they're leaning into growing up and holden despises that because he tries he's very contented he's still trying to be a child it's why he's very playful it's why he randomly attacks you know and tries to fight with his friends or his peers or whatever it may be. For instance, he says, I can't explain it. I just didn't like anything that was happening at Pensy. I can't explain what's happening. And what he doesn't like is that A, they're growing up and a big part of this growing up is a lot of them are dating girls

52:00and potentially having sex. And sex is a big part of Holden's reluctance to grow up and his fear of adulthood. Because more than anything, sex represents that boundary line between childhood innocence and adult experience. And there's this slightly odd, ambiguous scene, for instance, that kind of epitomizes all of Holden's worst fears about the dishonesty and distrustfulness of adults, which is when he goes to see his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, and he liked him and he trusts him. He thinks that Mr. Antolini gets it. One of Holden's schoolmates killed himself and Mr. Antolini is the one who goes and picks up the body. He trusts him. And then at one point, Holden falls asleep there and he wakes up and Mr Antolini is touching his head Holden in Tarkus this is potentially sexually sinister it's never made

52:51clear whether or not it actually is yeah I like the fact that the book is so I agree I agree I think it's not lazy it's not obvious it's not it's perfectly yeah there is there is no point us in a way as readers trying to speculate whether Mr. Anselini is actually incredibly creepy and dodgy or whether actually Mr. Anselini has just been kind. We have no way of knowing. More importantly, it tells us something about Holden's state of mind, which is like seeing sexuality everywhere and being on his guard against it and being paranoid about it. But then it's more complex than that though, isn't it? Because he doesn't just hate and fear and dread sex he's also really curious about it that's so do you not think that is so teenage that is so kind of a 15 16 year old boy simultaneously

53:38extremely curious about this thing that you've heard so much about and you can you know it is stirring within you as it were but also anxious And it is stirring within you, as it were. But also anxious about it, nervous. What does it actually mean? You know, how will I measure up? Anxious about not having it as well. A bit like Esther in the bell jar. Of course. Nothing worse than the teenager. For the teenager who is not in a relationship to be thinking, gosh know i'm missing out and everybody else is having such fun but then he also does that classic teenage boy thing where where he he kind of lies about it like he calls himself one point a sex maniac i'm a sex maniac i'm having so much sex i'm a i'm a sex maniac but actually exactly you know he's got great anxiety

54:21about the whole thing but the thing about about him, almost having sexual experiences, but never following through with it. Yeah. I mean, that runs through the book. And the classic example of this is when he hires this prostitute called Sunny and she comes up to his room. It's an absolutely excruciating scene, but very well observed, I think. She comes upstairs and he basically is desperate not to go through with this. And he ends up trying to have a conversation with her. And the whole thing ends disastrously because the bloke comes up and asks him for more money and it's just all so awkward. He pretends to have a serious injury to get out of it. Yeah. There is one girl who he is very, very fond of.

54:59And this is Jane Gallagher. And she's his sort of childhood crush. She was a neighbour neighbor wasn't she and um he says of his he he idealizes her he's not a misogynist because actually he criticizes his his school fellows because he says they they force themselves on girls the girls ask them to stop and the boys don't oh yeah it's quite sort of sinister rape undertones but also he hates the idea that these boys would have sex without a human connection without an emotional connection he finds that you know the most overused word of any episode ever but phony he does indeed and what really drives him mad and actually drives into physical violence is that a boy there's this boy called straddle eater at the school who is going out with jane and

55:46started dating jane holden's old crush holden is maddened by this it's partly jealousy because he has a little bit of a crush on jane but it is more than that isn't it he thinks that straddle is corrupting her innocence jane to him is a paragon of childhood virtue, of a sort of innocent fun that they had and their friendship playing board games. He describes how Jane, actually, when they played checkers kind of drafts, she would keep her kings at the back. I like that detail. I mean, that's a security measure. That's being cautious. And she's herself being protective of her pieces. And that makes him protective of her because he's anxious that Stradlater is forcing himself on Jane. Especially as she had quite a dodgy relationship

56:30with her stepfather. So he's even more protective. That said, he's not a total, you know, feminist paragon or whatever. No, of course not. Like any teen boy. I mean, he does objectify women at times. And, you know, he does deal in cliches. But you feel like those cliches are half-hearted. You feel like he's almost saying it because he suddenly remembers himself and he's like, you know, I almost want to impress the reader, you know, because he says things like, that's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them. And then you never know where the hell you are girls jesus christ they can drive you crazy they really can so there's

57:09something very kind of marlon brando or whatever about that you know it's not it doesn't feel authentic um and that goes hand in hand with the contradictions that are just you know woven throughout holden's nature so the fact that he wants to sort of freeze his childhood and he idealizes his childhood. But he's also curious about sex and is on some kind of a journey. But is he on a journey? Because you described it at the beginning as a coming of age novel. That's exactly how it's often described. Sold as well. It's sold as a coming of age novel. But the thing is, does Holden go on a journey? Does he develop or come of age? So to be critical of the book, when we're in like chapter three or something,

57:49you might think, well, we're going to, we will unravel more complexities of Holden's character. Holden himself will go on a journey. I mean, that's the standard thing. It's what Huckabee Finn did. It's what David Copperfield did. It's what all these characters. Joe March, you know. Yeah, they go on a journey. The standard thing in a coming of age novel, I mean, we talked about this with Little Women, a series of trials and tests that you overcome. You discover things about yourself that you didn't know you, your strengths that you didn't know you had. You become more virtuous. You overcome your various sort of hurdles and you're a different person at the end of the book and a more grown up, more rounded, better person.

58:24That's not true of Holden. Holden is still the same. Holden has not overcome anything necessarily. He's actually walked away from a series of trials, you could say. And actually, his development, as it were, is still incomplete. He's still the same conflicted Holden at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. In fact, the end of the book as he was at the beginning. In fact, the end of the book is him, you know, with Phoebe. He's watching her doing a childish thing, going on this sort of merry-go-round or whatever it is. And he's run away completely from the adult world at that point, psychologically. Do you not think? It basically depends, I think, on whether or not you see the ending of the book as optimistic or pessimistic.

59:01I think that there is an ambiguous hopefulness to the ending that means that it is a, it is a, there is a partial coming of age element to it. It's a bit like the bell jar. So both books are too rooted in reality to deal in cheap one dimensional endings. Yeah, Holden is in a facility, his future is uncertain. We don't know if he'll find peace, we don't know if he'll fit in. We don't know if he'll find peace we don't know if he'll fit in we don't know if he'll overcome his grief but you get the sense from the implications surrounding the fact that he meets his parents and goes to a facility and is potentially going to go back to school that he's maybe no longer running and that he has softened and he actually admits to missing some

59:39of the people that he claimed to loathe before so stradley or whatever um and he also is a he also now lives nearer his older brother db and db has had quite a hard time in holden's mouth whatever from his pen throughout the book because you know db's older ali is the paragon because he's younger whereas he's kind of potentially you know accepting his brother as the model his older brother is the model rather than the younger and that's like an acceptance of growing up the scene as you say where he sees phoebe he's actually happy to watch her because she and there's a symbolic resonance of the fact that she reaches for this gold ring and he doesn't try to protect her or catch her it's it's like an

1:00:22acceptance that she'll grow up he's letting go of this fantasy of the catcher in the rye but then that said the final line of the book is devastating i think don't ever tell anybody anything if you do you start missing everybody so that i would say is quite pessimistic yeah i would say it's above all ambiguous a sense of distrust don't let yourself be vulnerable don't exactly don't let yourself be vulnerable. Exactly. Don't let your guard down because you'll be hurt. You'll start missing everybody, that sense of loss and grief implicit in those words. So that's not total acceptance. Well, I guess it's an ambiguous ending. I mean, let's compromise on that. What about the afterlife of Katja and I?

1:01:01Colourful afterlife and not in a good way. No, I mean, it's obviously been immortalised for all sorts of different reasons, but there is a slightly unsavoury element to it. Yeah, we discussed how it's been banned in many, many schools and libraries, but there are two incidents in particular with which the book is associated that are quite dark. So Mark David Chapman was famously carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rite when he murdered John Lennon in 1980. And he later cited Holden Caulfield as an influence. Yeah, he did. And then John Hinckley Jr. also had a copy of the book when he attempted to assassinate President Reagan in 1981. What appeals to perhaps a sort of more slightly, you know, to loners or to people who

1:01:47feel marginal or whatever is Holden's persona and his own feeling of loneliness and marginalization. But in absolutely no way whatsoever could this be seen as a book that is in any way associated with violence or whatever. I would say that's a big misreading from those two individuals but it captures the way in which the book has become an emblem of teenage angst in a way that no book had really done before so this you know we've done the bell jar when we were uh doing our books mini series on the rest is history we did les tanges by camus the stranger the outsider the psychoanalyst anna freud who was absolutely pioneering in child psychology the daughter of sigmund freud she said of this book my analytic patients used to speak of holden caulfield sometimes as if they'd

1:02:37actually met him they used his words his way of speaking i began to realize they'd taken him into their minds and hugged him. So there is something about Holden's vulnerability. And I think it's because it's not just that he's a teenager. I think what he is, is a slightly self-hating teenager who is frightened of letting go of his childhood. And that is an experience that happens. It's quite a short period of time. I think that that happens in your life. What is it? A is it a year 18 months two years maybe and then it's gone because you're fully a teenager and then you're an adult yeah but it's but it's a very particular moment quite a destabilizing moment for some people and he's a literary hero who's also a fish out of water you know there's

1:03:18something relatable in that there's also just the fact that it's had a big influence on other books that came subsequently, as Robert McCrum says, part of its hypnotic grip on the American imagination comes from the way that it's been written and rewritten. It has been replicated a million different ways. Like again, Louis Menard calls it a literary genre of its own. And I think he's right. You can see its imprint on the Belgium, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I'm not even talking about the themes necessarily, the style as well as the themes. Even Jacqueline Wilson. Wow, I didn't expect she was going to appear. Yeah, there you go. Okay. You know, it's like, it's the godfather of what it's like to be a teenager

1:03:56told from a teenage perspective. But it's also, I think, the fact that Salinger has a bit of a mythos of his own. Yeah, he does have a mythos. And people buy into that. The question then is though, does it still have this hold on young people's imaginations? Does it still mean so much to people? Yeah, I don't think it does strike the same chord anymore. I think young people of today have probably evolved past the catcher in the ride. The idea that to feel alienated or dissatisfied with the world is in some way shocking or revolutionary it's so banal now even yeah almost to become a cliche yeah or to feel out of sea emotionally and different from other people ditto so widely except and it's well trodden ground as well. You know, literature, I think, has gone much deeper

1:04:45and it's much more willing to shock. You know, Secret History is a book about young people. Even like A Little Life, you know, those are the kind of books that are sort of shattering people's minds these days. And also the slang is quite outdated, I think. The slang is outdated, but of course slang is always outdated. If you'd read a book from the 1980s, the slang is quite outdated i think slang is outdated because slang is always outdated if you treat a book from the 1980s the slang would be outdated in some ways but but that meant so much for a particular generation of american teens yeah i guess so i guess so i think holden is still a very uh well-drawn and memorable character i don't he's not always likable but i

1:05:21think there was something quite touching about holden. I couldn't agree more. All right. So, Tabby, we're going to mark this out of 10. As always, Holden would despise this as phony, but we're going to do it anyway. What's your index? So we could do it in phony, crummy, hot shot max out of 10. Okay. Or back to front red hunting hats. That's probably the more iconic. I feel the hat. I think we've got to go with the hat. Yeah, it's got to be the hat. Okay. You go first. I was tempted to revise my mark, actually, because I really enjoyed the episode. Aww. Yeah, I enjoyed your amazing insights. But actually, no, I'm not going to. I'm going to stick with my original mark. That is so crummy and phony and all the bad words.

1:06:08Yeah, I'm actually going to give it a six. Now that seems, wow. I mean, that seems so harsh, but I sort of felt like the point had been made. I didn't feel, I mean, this has happened a few times with books. I like a book where I feel like I'm on an intellectual journey as I'm reading it that's so deep thanks and i didn't really feel that with this okay i yeah it just didn't speak to me and i don't think that's just because i'm no longer a teenager i think there is i think it is slightly one note i don't think it's badly written i think that is that jonathan yardley verdict is unfair i. I think it captures Holden's voice very well. And I think there is much more to Holden than merely alienation and stuff,

1:06:50as we've talked about. So true. There is this grief and whatnot. However, ultimately, I found it quite slight. And I would, if somebody said to me, can you recommend your favorite books in the book club? This would not be one of them. So there you go. What about you? I'm going to give it a 7.5 i love the yeah i love the tone and the style i love holden as a character i find him genuinely endearing and and an oddly comforting presence in my mind and i find him funny i find the book actually quite funny at moments and i have a lot of sympathy for him but that said i also agree it could it is a tiny bit one note maybe and i'd also cut out a little bit of the middle section i think it's too much

1:07:31wandering around new york agreed i think it's too long oddly for quite a short book i think it's definitely too long i agree you know actually we never discussed this did you know that some of the people that have absolutely killed or tried to make a movie out of this and being turned down flat so you said leonardo dicaprio wants to make a film yeah i mean he wanted he wanted to make a film of it with i think toby mcguire playing holden or toby mcguire in his spite peter parker incarnation would have been excellent as holden i think and spielberg also was dying to make a film about it and keanu reeves i think said he wanted to play holden and someone else but part of the reason salinger was so anti the idea of this make a film about it. And Keanu Reeves, I think, said he wanted to play Holden and someone else.

1:08:07But part of the reason Salinger was so anti the idea of this becoming a film is because he said that you would never be able to transfer Holden's, you know, confessional inner monologue into the film, into a film. And I actually agree with that. You would have to be done either with a voiceover, which is sometimes a bit annoying. Or Holden talking directly to the camera. Yeah. I would have thought. And both of those. Well, he could. Could be a. Or Holden talking directly to the camera. Yeah. I would have thought. And both of those. Well, he could... Could be a bit boring as a film, to be honest. Well, this is an issue with the book. It's episodic. It's one thing after another. And you know you were saying in the genesis of the book

1:08:37how Salinger had written these short stories and sketches. It absolutely does feel like that in the middle of the book. Like this is a lot of vignettes stitched together then we go to the ducks then we go to a bar then we go to the theater yeah i agree yeah all right so um tabby do you have one last admonition for the listeners i think you do you have an instruction or a quest do you not well i would never instruct because that would be you know behaving like the man i would encourage everyone to sign up to our own gang of depressed rebels um and join book club notes so you can let us know what you would give this book out of 10 you can send in your recommendations you also get a free back to front red deer hunting cap so that's exciting just that

1:09:24was that was phony from tabby that's actually there's no such cap but i would encourage people to get it because it is genuinely brilliant okay so the book club hq.com and coming up we have master and commander by patrick o'brien it's a killer mockingbird by harper lee money by martin amos tinker sailor soldier spy by tinker sailor what he's just babbling no you said tinker sailor i didn'ty. Tinker Sailor. What? You're just babbling. No, you said Tinker Sailor. I didn't. I said Tinker Sailor. You said Tinker Sailor. I absolutely... Right, let's just go make up their own minds. Tests of the Turbophils by Thomas Hardy and Dune by Frank Herbert. God, I'm actually not looking forward to reading Dune.

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