Catcher If You Can
I've been thinking about Catcher in the Rye these days. If I weren't in law school, I would be rereading it now. But I haven't been able to get Holden Caulfield out of my mind since last summer.
Hot take: Catcher in the Rye is a remarkable book about being a teenager. The good of the novel is in the tension between Holden desperately wanting someone to listen to him and Holden not wanting to seem desperate to be listened to. None of the adults in Holden's life have the time or desire to hear his fears about getting older, much less assuage them. Instead, Holden tells us, the reader-listener, about his struggles in his own famous (or infamous) voice.
Holden is desperate, but he also knows that desperation is not cool. He uses a barrage of techniques to seem intriguing without looking like a loser. He swears in the way teenagers do when they're trying to sound like grown-ups. He hedges everything he says with mitigating words, building a barbed-wire fence of language around himself. Opening to a random page, I find Holden's thoughts buried beneath "anyway," "though," "or something," "and all," "or anything," "in a way," "if you want to know the truth" and "sort of." In fact, "sort of" appears in the novel 179 times.
Holden also begins dozens of his sentences with "Listen," as though he's afraid we won't if he doesn't ask us to. But you have to listen very carefully, or you'll miss what he is really saying. It's not just Holden's opinions that get buried; it's also his trauma.
For example, after his teacher Mr. Antolini hits on him, Holden bolts out of the creep's apartment. Mr. Antolini blames Holden for the teacher's own advances. He tells the teenager that he's "being ridiculous" and calls him a "very, very strange boy." Holden seems to resist it ("strange, my ass," he thinks), but you can tell he's internalized it... and not for the first time. On the elevator down from Mr. Antolini's, Holden tells us:
I got in and went down. Boy, I was shaking like a madman. I was sweating, too. When something perverty like that happens, I start sweating like a bastard. That kind of stuff's happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can't stand it.
Twenty times. This kid has been the victim of adult sexual abuse or assault twenty times by age 16 (given his how he understates his personal pain, it might be more). He admits it so casually too. Holden doesn't want to bother us with his trauma, but at the same time, he's dying for someone to ask. And if you're not paying attention, you'll gloss right over it.
Holden does this over and over. He ends a story about his beloved brother Allie's baseball glove with the abrupt "he's dead now," as if we wouldn't care about Allie if Holden told us he was dead from the start. About 5% of the words in the novel are swear words, many of them paired with Holden's expressions of love for his (dead) brother and (living) sister, as if to make such a silly, childish feeling as love seem more serious to us via punchy, adult language. The first words of the entire novel are "if you really want to hear about it," as if Holden, who is dying to be heard (he's narrating from a mental hospital, for crying out loud), has to make sure it seems like our idea before he tells us anything.
Holden thinks we won't take him seriously if he brings us his true feelings. And based on the actions of every adult in the novel, he's not wrong to think so.
This theme- kids being certain that they won't be heard or believed- occurs again and again and again in children's and young adult literature. Fearing that the Professor will think Lucy is crazy, the eldest Pevensie kids fight over whether or not they should tell him about the "made-up" (spoiler: not made-up) world in the wardrobe. Matilda's classmates keep her extraordinary abilities secret until Matilda learns she can trust Ms. Honey, who doesn't believe Matilda when she first reveals her telekinesis. Dumbledore was remarkable because he was that rare adult who actually believed Harry, Ron, and Hermione when they told him what was going on (which, I maintain, is the reason we kids would all die for that fictional character). It is revolutionary when an adult in children's/YA lit believes the kids and wants to hear them talk.
Why does it matter? Because kids matter.
A few summers ago, I interviewed several dozen homeless youth all across Texas for my job at Texas Appleseed. They were amazing. Smart, funny, sweet, contemplative, determined people between the ages of 18 and 25. They answered all my questions, and then some. I learned about their dreams and their traumas and their fears. But to do that, I had to ask. I had to listen. I had to follow up on what I thought I'd heard, and I had to show them that I cared. Every assumption that people make about homeless people and high school dropouts and kids who bounce from foster home to foster home fell away as I met these distinct and wonderful individuals who all had one thing in common: adults had disregarded them.
Like Whitney Houston, I believe the children are our future, but they are also so much of our present. When I met my friend Drew, he was four years old. I was walking off stage at kamp, convinced I had done a terrible job, when Drew's mom (an absolute godsend of a human) said, "Do you mind if he sits by you? He thinks you're amazing." Drew reminded me to cool it and just be nicer to myself. He still does. Drew makes me want to be as great as Drew thinks I am. Where else can you get that cocktail of motivation and inspiration but from kids?
I've recently encountered the belief that "adults are just waiting for children to age into something worth conversing with." I couldn't disagree more. Kids are brilliant and kind and clever and curious in ways that adults have lost. And if we want them to age into something that wants to hold conversations, we have to listen to them. We have to take them seriously. We have to value them. And we have to believe them. Let's not let any kids feel as hopeless as Holden Caulfield ever again.