The Catcher in the Rye

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown and Company: Boston, 1951.

Annotation: In a fit of disgust with his surroundings and circumstances, Holden Caulfield wanders around NYC alone for a couple of days.

Justification for nomination: Holden Caulfield is a quintessential teen, caught like a fly in a web of adolescent developmental hallmarks. Heightened acuity coupled with high idealism and increased sensitivity to criticism lead to his emotional and intellectual distress. The rollercoaster of his thoughts and emotions is essentially the plot in this story - the action and interpersonal exchanges take second stage to Holden's incessant evaluation and criticism of the world.

Holden recollects his misadventures in New York City as an incident that happened one year in the past and necessitated some sort of recuperative care. "I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy," he tells the reader on the first page. He'd gotten kicked out of his third expensive prep school since he was failing four classes. Filled with disdain for society and "phonies", Holden leaves the school ahead of schedule and takes the train to New York City, where his family lives. He doesn't go home, however. He gets himself a room in a sleazy hotel and wanders around the city, at the mercy of his discontent. Eventually, his thoughts bring him to a pivotal event, revealed to the reader in discontinuous bits. Holden had witnessed the suicide of a fellow student at one of his previous schools. Salinger leaves it to the reader to decide how this affected Holden and refrains entirely from didacticism in any form (unlike Keesha's House!). This makes it a fine book for discussion, but perhaps not the best book for an individual teen to read. Nonetheless, given its groundbreaking and significant status as perhaps the first YA title ever published, I can't NOT nominate this book for a Mock Printz.

Genre: Edgy/coming-of-age.