In a 2012 article from Slate, a high-school English teacher, Jessica
Roake, describes how excited she was to first teach The Catcher in the Rye, and
how disappointed she was to discover that her students failed to relate to
Holden Caulfield in the way she’d expected. Like many who have put this novel on
their syllabus, she had anticipated “blowing their minds”: “They would see themselves in Holden Caulfield, and J. D.
Salinger’s words would elucidate their own frustrations and struggles. They
would write righteous screeds against phoniness, start keeping journals, and
forever treasure their pored-over paperback. The book would blow the minds of
teenagers seeking a pilgrim soul—a friend’s voice in the wild of adolescence.”
Instead, they were merely bored. Holden’s world seemed impossibly ancient to
them, and they couldn’t relate to his “first-world problems.” He was a whiny,
privileged white boy who needs to get over himself. His slang was antiquated
and quaint, the cultural references (Peter Lorre, the Lunts) failed to
resonate, and his disillusionment seemed like a cliché, “fundamental teenage anguish.”
Salinger’s New York, to twenty-first-century readers, feels as distant as
Fitzgerald’s West Egg in The Great
Gatsby: “places of antiquated privilege and clarinet-heavy music.”
In a particularly pithy (and home-hitting) formulation, Roake notes that Catcher is “no longer a book for cool
high-school students” but only “for cool high school teachers.” (Ouch!) Its ubiquity is part of the problem. The book is
assigned so frequently in high school, and so often framed as “the
book that will change your life,” that a student is wise to approach it with
skepticism: how subversive can it be if my teacher
is insisting that I read it? (When I was teaching Catcher in CoA Novel a few years back, the director of the school
dropped by to observe class for a couple minutes. As he was taking his leave,
he briefly interrupted the discussion to declare Catcher the “best book ever.” I don’t
doubt the sincerity of the sentiment, or the enthusiasm; but it’s a nice
illustration of the paradoxical dynamic Roake is talking about, and I suspect
Holden would be bemused at the endorsement of such an authority figure.)
Roake decided that, as much as she loved Catcher in her day, and as much as she believes that there is much
to be gained from reading it, contemporary students need a new book for their
generation that defines what it is to be young, confused, and idealistic in the
face of an often brutal and hypocritical world. Her nomination: David Mitchell’s
Black Swan Green.
My
initial reaction upon reading this article was to be glad that I teach the
kinds of classes I teach at Uni—junior-senior semester-long special-topics seminars—because
this means I don’t have to choose between Catcher
and Black Swan Green. I get to teach
them both, in a course devoted entirely to the coming-of-age novel. Most high-school English teachers face a range of constraints on
their curricula; they might be expected to cover particular material
over the course of a schoolyear, and thus they might only be able to accommodate
one “teenage novel.” I don’t know that I’d want to choose between Salinger and
Mitchell; I’ve had a lot of fun teaching them both, as they bounce off each
other in interesting ways. (Consider how often this semester we’ve used Holden
as a point of comparison, a touchstone of quintessential teenagerhood
against which to measure other characters and their situations. Even students who failed to fall in love with the book find it useful as a paradigm.)
I
can partly see where Roake is coming from, and I’ve been aware of the growing
view of Catcher as “outdated” even
before this. When Salinger died, in early 2010, commentaries seemed to fall
into two categories, with little neutral territory between them: there were the
“this book changed my life” testimonials, and the “I never saw why this book is such a
big deal” rebuttals. Common to the haters was (often) the familiar framework where the book had been built up as the most world-shifting,
life-changing representation of adolescent human experience ever committed to
print; this kind of hype almost guarantees a certain percentage of shrugging, “no
big deal” responses. Add to this the irony of a story about a teenage rebel
and truant being endorsed and celebrated by the very figures of authority
the book denounces as “phony” (who themselves discipline students for being rebels and truants) and a certain type of reader is bound to be
turned off. It feels like a fraud—“rebellion” packaged as schoolwork.
None
of this has ever stopped me from including the novel on my syllabi, in college
courses and in the Coming-of-Age Novel here at Uni. I suppose I’m lucky that my
senior AP English teacher, Mrs. McLean, didn’t tell me the book was going to
change my life—it was just assigned as the next thing on our syllabus. I had
the vague sense it was probably about baseball; I knew Billy Joel mentioned it
in that song about not starting the fire, which we talked about in history
class; I knew that Ad-Rock had boasted that he’s “got more stories than J.D.’s
got Salinger” on the new Beastie Boys record. But otherwise, I came to it with
no particular expectations—and this was a good thing. I felt like I was “discovering”
it on my own. I didn’t expect anything like Holden’s narrative voice, or his
general attitude, and it truly felt “refreshing,” as cliché as that sounds now.
And over the last twenty years, I’ve seen students of various genders respond
strongly to the novel—maybe girls especially, despite so many commentators
dismissing it as a “boys’ book.” It still has the capacity to surprise, amuse,
delight, and confound—when you get past the dated slang, the “goddamns” and “as
hells,” Holden still cracks kids up (“Suave as hell, boy”). They still feel
like he confides in them, and even readers who are turned off by what seems
like his arrogance and apathy at the start can be brought around, by the end,
to appreciate the idealism and loneliness at the heart of this enigmatic
character.
Not
everyone likes Holden Caulfield, of course—and this should be no surprise. I’m
not especially looking for unanimity in any aspect of this (or any) course, but
I certainly don’t expect to find it with Catcher
in the Rye. Some of you end up liking Holden, even caring deeply about him—even
if we do peer through a good deal of historical and cultural distance to
imagine the postwar New York he wanders through, it’s easy enough to find the human heart to the story. Some of you never warm to him, find him
affected, hypocritical, judgmental, overwhelmingly negative. Others are
exasperated at his generally ungrateful attitude, his white-boy privilege, and
his ennui. Both of these responses—and the whole range of gradations in
between—are not incompatible with a rewarding and valuable study of the novel.
I don’t put it on my syllabus to change your life; I believe there’s value in working out your own
response to Holden, and that you learn a lot about yourself and your world when
you do so. You don’t have to fall in love with him, or the book. But it’s also
okay with me if you do.
Black Swan Green is another story. Pretty much everyone in class, every time I’ve taught this novel, falls
in love with Jason Taylor, and with the novel. I’ve heard from multiple alums
of this course that it’s their favorite on the syllabus (apparently Ms. K, who was a student in the spring 2013 incarnation of this course, was overheard enthusing about it the other day!), and a number of people
have already gone back and reread it. Roake points out a lot of similarities
between these two books, and she articulates nicely some of the important
differences, as well: “Holden’s cynicism and
alienation from the world he inhabits have become a cliché; the sincerity and
openness of young Jason feels fresh. He reads as real and naive, as immature as
Holden is jaded. Instead of finding almost everything ‘sad as hell,’ Jason
remains childlike in his enthusiasm for all the ‘epic’ things around him, even
as the events of his life become harder for him to process.” I think age may
have something to do with this: readers your age feel protective of Jason; he’s
like your little brother, or your Subbie Buddy, going through a period you’ve just emerged from, and
like Julia at the end, you want to tell him it’ll all be okay, even if it doesn’t
feel like it just now. But unlike Holden, about whom the jury remains out at
the end of the novel, in terms of significant growth and development in his
character, Jason is inspiringly dynamic. We see him grow in small and large
ways over the course of his thirteenth year, and although we know he’s in for
any number of trials and torments as he begins his fourteenth year as the “new
kid” at his new school, we also are happy in the knowledge that he seems
better prepared to deal with them.
Jason is a less divisive character than Holden—and for all
the talk about “this novel changed my life” coming from your parents’
generation, I suspect he always has been. He’s crude, confrontational,
abrasive. He makes fun of deeply held American values, like equating one’s ego
with the type of car one drives, and this must cut close to the bone for many
readers. He doesn’t hold himself up to his own standards, consistently, and
this chips away at the authority he tries to consolidate with his reckless
generalizations about “people” and what they “always” do. Jason confronts many
of the same problems, but he doesn’t rant about them very often or with the
same energetic spleen as Holden does. He’s simply easier to like and, for many
readers of both genders, to relate to.
And Black Swan Green, as Roake points out, is still not widely
known—it still feels like a discovery, or a secret, and you may want to pass it
on to your friends. Even though it’s set in 1982 (i.e. your parents’ generation), it feels a lot more contemporary than Catcher in the Rye does. Jason doesn’t
have the internet, or digital media, or mobile connectivity, or whatever, but
the suburban landscape he faces, the domestic troubles, the bullying, the complications of self-editing, the gender anxiety, all looks
very familiar to contemporary young readers.
I’m curious to hear your responses to Roak’s article, as
readers of both Catcher and Black Swan Green. I’ve had a very
similar kind of good time teaching both of them, and they both are books that I’m
glad to bring into your lives at this crucial stage. My admiration for Black Swan Green deepens each time I
teach it—that’s one of the pleasures of discovery, figuring out all the
connections and interrelated themes and motifs and structural features on our
own, without the burden of years of critical study and classroom lessons to
lean on. In fact, I try hard to avoid
some of the most common conversations about Catcher
(notice that we didn’t really talk about the “symbolism of the red hunting hat”
or the “symbolism of the ducks in Central Park” at all!), so we can focus more
on the beguiling and seductive narrative voice. With Black Swan Green, as a teacher, I have that feeling of discovering
a book that we all can share as a secret. If it were to become the “next Catcher,” I worry that such status might
ruin it a little. I often wish Catcher
were not the second-most commonly taught novel in high school. I kind of hope
it does fall from this status a bit.
I’d much rather teach it to students who don’t come to it with any
preconceptions, positive or negative.
Do I like Black Swan
Green “better” than Catcher? I
can’t say. In some ways, yes. Jason Taylor’s world is much more familiar to me
and my personal experiences than Holden’s is. But Catcher itself is part of
my development as a person, and the development of my tastes—the very tastes
that lead me to enjoy Mitchell’s novel so much. I can’t excise it from my
personal history; I encountered it at such an early age in my reading life, its
influence can’t even be measured. It’s not simply a matter of how distant
Holden’s era is from my own; reading his book is a part of my experience of the 1980s.
Read both.
I’m glad I don’t have to choose.
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