The Catcher In The Rye has taken a strange place in history. It’s one of those famous books that a lot of people who’ve never read it love to talk about. It was inspiration for a murder. And it’s one of the best and supposedly most dangerous books I’ve read in a while.
I think I should start with the murder. It’s not just one, actually, but it's best known for inspiring Mark David Chapman’s killing of John Lennon. I couldn’t go into all the details of why people kill, but I don’t think that any normal person would read one book and go out and kill somebody. Media affects society and individuals, of course, but not to that extent. John Lennon died because someone hated him. Mark David Chapman killed for more reasons than that he read The Catcher In The Rye; this was just something he grabbed onto.
On the topic of what this book will do to your kid, I want to mention something that is critical when discussing book bans. You can and should talk to your child about what they read. Holden Caulfield is not a very nice person. He is sympathetic and in many ways good, but he is still rude and dislikes most people. You can say, “Hey, Holden’s kind of a jerk here. How do you feel about that?” Any kid who has willingly picked up The Catcher In The Rye is probably smart enough to understand that Holden is someone to perhaps relate to, but not look up to, and you can help guide them there.
I’ve also seen people who find this book messy and uninteresting, and Holden to be a completely unlikable character. While I won’t claim their opinions are wrong, I think it just may not be the book for them. In my opinion, this book is so captivating because it invites you into the mind of a depressed teenager, a boy who finds everyone phony, a kid who doesn’t even know how migration works, and is teetering on the edge between adulthood and childhood. You may relate to him or not, but he is far from what you usually get in a protagonist.
Onto the reasons this book was banned. I wouldn’t say, despite its rather disillusioned protagonist, that this book uses much profanity. It uses the word “goddam” in pretty much every other sentence, but so do a lot of people I know. The sexual explicitness has a bit more of a leg to stand on, but not a ton. Holden talks about his… unluckiness with girls, I suppose? He claims he has nearly lost his virginity multiple times, and every time, something interrupts. It’s all very funny, honestly. He also hires a prostitute at one point, though he gets so depressed he tries just talking to her and then makes her leave. He also stays at a former teacher’s house and awakes with his hand in his hair, but none of this is what one might call explicit.
I’m not sure what Catcher In The Rye’s target audience is, considering it’s beloved from teenagers to those who were teenagers when it first came out, but it’s read in many high school classes, and Holden himself is sixteen, so I’d say around there. Nothing in this book is anything new to the modern teenager, and it is, if anything, tame.
I truly do love The Catcher In The Rye, and I understand why many people don’t. But keeping it away from people is not saving them from anything. I didn’t find any great threat to the world in this book. I wonder where other people do. Creating fear around it makes it something mysterious, makes it maybe more dangerous than it really is. There is nothing in The Catcher In The Rye that you cannot find in any high school, and maybe seeing into the mind of a troubled teen is just what you need to understand why this book is so important.