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Was Holden Caulfield Really ‘A Rebel’?
You loved him when you were 13, but a top critic ‘damn near puked’ when he reread ‘The Catcher in the Rye’
Everyone knows that Holden Caulfield hated “phonies.” Or at least, everyone who read The Catcher in the Rye — as I did — at the age of 13. But was Caulfield a phony himself?
Jonathan Yardley, the Pulitzer Prize–winning former book critic for the Washington Post, makes a strong case for it in a scathing pan of the novel. Yardley writes that when he read The Catcher in the Rye in school, he had mixed reactions to J.D. Salinger’s 16-year-old antihero:
“I shared Caulfield’s contempt for ‘phonies’ as well as his sense of being different and his loneliness, but he seemed to me just as phony as those he criticized as well as an unregenerate whiner and egotist.”
Yardley reread the novel for his Second Reading series of reviews for the Post and found that his view of the novel hadn’t mellowed. In fact, he “damn near puked” at one point. He writes:
“What most struck me upon reading it for a second time was how sentimental — how outright squishy — it is. The novel is commonly represented as an expression of adolescent cynicism and rebellion — a James Dean movie…
