J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye manages to scrounge some morsels of decent writing from the general morass of generic pigslop, but for the most part remains in the dreary rain of mediocrity.

            To build tension, stories should grab the reader and link them in the author’s thrall.  Salinger eschews the typical methods for engrossing the reader, and replaces them with… nothing, except perhaps brevity.  Character development is present, a welcome change from the masses of “me too” beach rags, but the central character, Holden Caulfield, is such an unlikable twat that watching him evolve from an obnoxious prick to an ignorant one is not exactly engrossing.  The “plot”, if one would sully the word so, is little more than a tour book for New York City, with Holden as an irascible guide.

The other characters in the book are almost total blanks.  Salinger does a decent job of distorting them through Holden’s perspective, but since Holden lives his life with blinders on, the reader hardly gets to know these other characters at all.  I could not find a compelling reason to care about a single one of them.  The most “developed” side character, Phoebe, is staggeringly generic, the classic heroic young girl archetype straight from nineteenth century literature.  Why Holden puts up with the little brat must be one of the great mysteries of the cosmos.

            Really, despite his ignorance and naiveté, Holden is one of the book’s few points of light.  The decision to make the central character an antihero at least shows some shred of originality, and Holden’s monologues accurately capture the mood of many loners struggling to adapt to the folly of our society.  Yet all this work is undone by Salinger’s slovenly prose.  Holden swears extensively, perhaps Salinger’s crude attempt at “authenticity”, and his internal monologues are barely more eloquent.  Whereas artists such as Proust would finely sculpt sentences and paragraphs, Salinger attacks them with a rusty chisel.

            I suppose that teenagers—the so called “target audience” for this sort of work—might find it vaguely endearing, on the off chance that they might pry themselves from their screens to explore the printed word.  Then again, this is like targeting a work at the lowest segment of intellectual society, and claiming it is “deep” because it has more substance than the other trash.  The competition is so weak that it would be almost impossible not to.  Compared to true masterpieces, Catcher in the Rye is little more than a paltry effort of a hack.