I was never forced to read Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sear) in high school, but, curious, I finally read it, maybe six months ago. In J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly, Jonathan Yardley sums up the experience:
‘The Catcher in the Rye’ is now, you’ll be told just about anywhere you ask, an ‘American classic,’ right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’ They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger’s execrable prose and Caulfield’s jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.