Is ‘Catcher in the Rye’ Still Relevant After 75 Years?

I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time ever this year, and I’m glad I did. I found its reputation for profanity to be well earned — but I was also surprised at its profundity.

This year is the 75th anniversary of the publication of this novel which is both enormously influential and shrouded in mystery because of the reclusive habits of its author, J.D. Salinger.

Like other Catholic readers of Salinger, I was first attracted to another book of his.

Salinger, who died in 2010, shunned media interviews and refused to allow his books to be made into movies or even audiobooks. He published very little apart from The Catcher in the Rye, but he did publish the Catholic favorite Franny and Zooey, a book in which one character discovers the Jesus Prayer. Salinger himself was raised in the Jewish faith, only finding out as a teenager that his mother was Catholic.

The Catcher was originally meant for adult audiences, but like any work that is “for adults” but features kids or teens, it was almost immediately adopted by adolescents. The book has sparked outsized reactions throughout its history. First, it became a bestseller, then it landed on “most banned” lists in the 20th century. Then, in the 21st century, it has appeared on prominent lists of “greatest novels of all time” and today it is far more likely to be required reading in classrooms than to be banned from them.

Startlingly, a recent review in First Things calls Catcher “the most Christian novel ever published.”

It’s hard to tell why someone would make such a claim, at first.

The Catcher in the Rye begins with the first-person narrator explaining that he has been kicked out of his private boarding school in Pennsylvania. Knowing he has time before word reaches his parents, he leaves to spend a few days in New York City where he attempts to pursue a life of debauchery.

Caulfield harshly judges everyone he meets, usually by dismissing them as “phony.” What the reader soon realizes is that Caulfield’s caustic persona is more “phony” than all of them.

In one beautiful passage, Holden sneaks into his younger sister Phoebe’s bedroom at night and wakes her up. She is the most authentic main character in the story, and his appreciation for her is endearing and telling. The reader is also slowly brought to understand what has made Caulfield the way he is: He is haunted by trauma in his past, including the death of one brother and the perceived betrayal of another.

As a work of literature, the book shares a lot in common with Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

• Both are written in the conversational slang of their narrators.
• In both cases, the subtext reveals as much or more than what the narrator means to say.
• And in both cases, the book reveals how society often misses its mark in what it tries to form (and malform) in the young.

Also, both books had enormous influence over what followed them.

For me, reading Catcher in the Rye shed a new light on the last several decades in popular culture.

This book was massively influential after it came out in 1951, and once you have read it, you can see its point of view everywhere in the cynicism about institutions and cult of authenticity that started in the 1950s and kept picking up steam from Dr. Strangelove to Saturday Night Live to Judd Apatow movies.

After The Catcher in the Rye, and at least in part because of it, the culture became willing to laugh at anything and everything, good or bad, that human beings did.

But Catcher also has an undeniable sweetness. The narrator genuinely cares for others, though he tries very hard not to. His repeated concerns about the ducks in New York’s Central Park, the dream he has that gives the book its title, and his final revelation watching children ride a merry-go-round, all show him to be someone who is more a victim of the world than a victimizer.

The novel doesn’t entice readers to sin so much as it saddens them at the plight of sinners.

The book — along with T.S. Eliot and Christopher Nolan — does a great job of demonstrating acedia.

Acedia, the boredom with life that Aquinas defines as “sadness at the will of God” can be translated as “sloth” or “apathy.”

It is an easy malady for young people to fall into. The messy, complicated world gives Caulfield much to mock, little to admire, and a compelling motive to flee his responsibilities. The technology and culture of his time — cabs, trains, and piano bars — give him the means.

Holden Caulfield is facing the world on the brink of adulthood, and he doesn’t know how to handle himself. He is a prime example of the modern stasis T.S. Eliot attributed to “The Waste Land” of the 20th century, a world stripped of the rituals and close community that once gave it meaning. In Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” he describes a man who has become a mere observer of life — so much so that the “song” of the title is sung by mermaids in his imagination.

That’s the world Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey depicts, also. In it, Odysseus’s son Telemachus, faces a world where fatherlessness in the aftermath of the Trojan War leaves his home a wreck and his heart unable to intervene. Telemachus doesn’t say, “Dare I disturb the universe?” like Prufrock, but he might as well.

Caulfield doesn’t say that either. He says, “When I really worry about something … I don’t want to interrupt my worrying to go.” He says sometimes he can’t even cross a street because “I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side.” And he says he finds he can’t care about anything.

He sounds like Prufrock or Telemachus: A young man ill-equipped to face the world, and ready to turn any excuse not to into an obsession.

And that is the trouble young people face today.

The worldly hypocrisy that enraged Caulfield 75 years ago is only worse today, with Church scandals, Covid resentment, and political turmoil all piling on — and now, new technologies give us more ways to escape than ever.

In fact, the only people Caulfield meets who he can’t dismiss as phony, and the ones who inspire him to be more, are missionary nuns he meets at a diner. He senses their innocence:

“These two nuns were sitting next to me, and we sort of struck up a conversation. .. [One] had a pretty nice smile when she looked at you. She had a big nose, and she had on those glasses with sort of iron rims that aren’t too attractive, but she had a helluva kind face.”

He tries to give the nuns money, but they refuse, since he doesn’t look well off. They eventually accept a small contribution, though. They are eating toast without eggs or bacon for breakfast and their simplicity embarrasses Caulfield, who orders a lot. They discuss literature with real understanding, and he says:

“I was glad those two nuns didn’t ask me if I was a Catholic. It wouldn’t have spoiled the conversation if they had, but it would’ve been different, probably.”

The joyful simplicity of the two consecrated women and their genuine kindness, without ulterior motives, shows Caulfield that the real way to rebel against hypocrisy is self-sacrifice and that the only way out of loneliness is love.

The Holden Caulfields of our day are finding the same thing, and are entering the Church in record numbers. Reading The Catcher in the Rye can soften our hearts a little bit to their plight, and make us just a little bit more welcoming.

A version of this appeared at Aleteia.

By Tom Hoopes