Details
Rent The Catcher in the Rye
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Publisher: Little Brown & Co
Published: Dec 1969
Genre: Fiction - Classics
Retail Price: $16.99
Pages: 277
Synopsis
Repetitive, indecent, often very funny, it is wonderfully sustained by the author, who achieves all those ancient effects to be got from a hero who is in some ways inferior, and in some ways superior, to the reader....Why, then, with all this to admire, do I find something phoney in the book itself?...[T]he adult view of adolescence, insinuated by skilful faking, is agreeable to predictable public taste....[It] is what the consumer needs....The boy's attitudes to religion, authority, art, sex and so on are what smart people would like other people to have, but cannot have themselves, because of their superior understanding.
Reviews
I have to admit--it wasn't at all what I expected. I'm used to reading college level books, which often requires me to look up words in a dictionary. This book is written in the first person in the perspective of a 16-year-old flunky, and that's exactly how it reads. True to the decade in which it takes place, it uses terms that I've only ever heard in old movies, like dough instead of money, and sore instead of ****ed off. When I initially finished it, I was very disappointed. But after brooding over it for a couple days, I realized that the main character's thoughts and feelings were very much like my own when I was a teen. So I give the author credit for capturing that awkward time so well.