The One Woman Book Club: Catcher in the Rye






tumblr_inline_n2nio74bej1qazwkmTeen angst isn’t gender specific. Angela Chase from My So-Called Life is basically my generation’s Holden Caulfield. But as my boyfriend, who works with people with mental illness says, men hate everyone else and women hate themselves. Holden thinks everyone else is the problem, and turns his anger outward. If this book was written about a teenage girl we would likely have been dealing with an eating disorder or self-harming.

How much can we trust Holden’s descriptions of other people? Is Ackley really as pimply and disgusting as we’re told he is? Is Phoebe really so smart and wonderful?

No. Long before I read this book, I knew Holden Caulfield was one of the original unreliable narrators.


Whoever wrote this is forgetting about Sally Hayes… but Salinger certainly isn’t the first writer to have a f-ed up attitude toward women. In this case, I think it’s reflective of how Holden sees women–and maybe women in general. You can be phony, you can be a cherubic little kid, or you can be a prostitute. There is no one who is just a happy, well adjusted, and likable.

But there is also the Madonna-Whore complex that afflicts to much of the world–including Holden. He’s incapable of having a normal relationship with a girl because he can only see them as pure innocence, or prostitutes. (And frankly, he doesn’t interact with them all that well.)


Every teen thinks they invented angst. But there is something about the post-war era that seems especially plagued with the feelings of boredom, indifference, and anxiety. It didn’t become known as the age of anxiety for no reason.

How many stories have we seen about bored ’50s housewives? Mad Men is an entire television series devoted to post-war anxiety.

In the end, existential angst isn’t really my thing. The “life is futile” mentality bothers me. It always has. It doesn’t matter why we’re here, we just are. And people are imperfect, that’s not news. But reading this book sure made me glad not to be a teenager anymore.

P.S. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why this book would make anyone want to kill John Lennon.



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