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Title: Dull, slow and whiny
Review: I tried to trudge through this novel in the 1980s when I was twenty. People had told me it was a book any young person could relate to, so I gave it a shot. At the time, I found nothing remotely relatable or interesting about it.I picked it up again in my 40s and again found nothing engaging or redeeming in the plot, characters or writing. It's like slow torture, watching this self-pitying, self-destructive, self-involved jerk spiral out of control. Are we supposed to pity him? Are we supposed to see ourselves in him? It's hard to care what happens to Holden, other than maybe feeling a deep-seated hope that he'll shut up already.It's clear what the appeal must have been 60 years ago: The narrator's then-naturalistic language broke taboos and the book spoke frankly about things traditionally unmentionable in fiction about teenagers. A sullen teen antihero was a radical change. But on its merits as literature away from that context, it's pretty awful.
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