I always have to be weary when  works from an author are published post-posthumously.

When I finally got around to reading Catcher in the Rye… well, I basically liked it, and understood roughly what is so effective about it.

More importantly, I understand both the reason for the detractors of this book it (class issue at stake: your spoiled rich kid who needs to just get over himself already)  and the lovers of the book (though I have been puzzled by some fans — like, your 18 year old proto- Abercombie and Fitch shopper… but, we’re all phonies calling everyone else phonies).

Into the darker corner of the book… the  “implicated in a the killing of John Lennon and attempted killing of Ronald Reagan” reputation.  Yep!  I got that too from reading it.  It’s good to read Arthur Bremer’s diary right alongside Catcher in the Rye, and then compare and contrast.
(And, no, don’t try that for a school assignment.)

So, what do I make of this commenter?

again, reads ever so much better if you are/were in/from New England. Not a book for summer time little league baseball kids.

it reads ever so much better if you live(d) in New England … not a book for southern farm kids

Wait.  He’s just calling everyone who doesn’t like Catcher in the Rye a bunch of phonies.  It’s like… he’s Houldon Caulfied.  Though… with a rather geocentric twist on his classifications.  Maybe we go back, a bit back-handedly, into the “having trouble sympathizing with some whining rich kid” in a New England border school idea, with what comes across as disparaging the “southern farm kids”.

Well… I suppose he’ll be able to dig further into his inner-world. One of the Salinger books would center on “Catcher” protagonist Holden Caulfield and his family, including a revised version of an early, unpublished story “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans.”   

I don’t think I will ever quite understand something like this:
Salinger: a burnt-out author running a publicity scam.
Notwithstanding the obvious:
That’s a good trick. He’s been dead since 2010.
Like: is this author worth actively hating, as opposed to passively hating and punting when you see an article put up concerning him?

This comment makes a bit more sense:
Another book about whiny, self-obsessed teens is just what America needs !!!
Particularly followed as it is by this response:
Only if it has vampires.
That’d actually be an interesting book.  If only that “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” fad (which probably only netted that one reasonably good book) had brought in a “Catcher in the Rye with emo-vampires/zombies/whatever” item… no, it wouldn’t get past the estate of JD Salinger.

Another bemusing comment:
They made me read Catcher in the Rye, when I was a kid in school, about thirteen I think.
I really disliked that book. I disliked everyone. I kept wishing Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, which I had read just before that one, would show up and rip off every one of their heads and defecate down their necks.
Wait.  It’s Houldon Caulfied again!

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