My Heart Still Belongs to Holden Caulfield

What Rereading The Catcher in the Rye in My Late 20s Taught Me About Nostalgia, Authenticity, and Growing Up

“Don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Since first reading Holden’s closing remarks in The Catcher in the Rye almost fifteen years ago, I’ve always been aware of the dangers of telling people “anything.” Ironically, as a writer, I’ve also found it nearly impossible to keep my mouth shut when it comes to hot takes or personal anecdotes, and I always wind up getting in trouble for it. Sure, some of my friends may get a kick out of my controversial opinions or the latest Liza Libes drama, but someone will almost always find a way to use the information you share against you.

And, as Holden tells us, you also start missing people.

Having recently told several friends about some hardships in my personal life, I couldn’t help but think back to Holden’s words. Retelling events from your past—or dwelling too deeply on them—really gets you missing the people who are no longer there. It might be better to forget about the past and move on with the future, but it’s damn hard not to think about those happy times when, with childlike wonder, you could look wide-eyed at a bluebird flitting through the rain. At some point or other, this plague of memory has affected all of us, but it seems to affect sentimental bastards like me and Holden Caulfield the most.

And that’s why The Catcher in the Rye has always been one of my favorite books.

Everyone knows that Holden’s primary struggle is his refusal to grow up. He doesn’t hide it, either—adults are phony bastards, and his little sister Phoebe is just about the only character in the book who makes him genuinely happy.

The Catcher in the Rye got me through my tumultuous teenage years when I, too, had an antipathy towards the idea of being an adult. I was never one of those kids who dreamed of growing up and living on their own. Instead, as a romantic, I’d always look back on the past with rosy glasses and reminisce about how things used to be better than they are now. Much like the protagonist of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, I had a fascination with bygone eras, and much like Jay Gatsby, I often had a strong desire to recreate moments from my past. It’s no wonder that at fourteen, I related so strongly to Holden Caulfield, who proclaims himself to be “crazy” about The Great Gatsby. As a kid, I dreaded entering adult life and wanted nothing more than to prolong my blissful teenage years. Holden was my dream man—I was just about ready to marry him. I even had a custom t-shirt from Etsy that said “My heart belongs to Holden Caulfield.”

As Holden would say, no kidding.

But entering the final years of my twenties, I started to wonder if I would still feel the same about Holden Caulfield—or if, as many online reviewers have expressed, I would just find him whiny, insecure, and annoying.

There was only one way to find out.

I’ve read Catcher twice in my life—once during my freshman year of high school, and once during my senior year. In both instances, I was a teenager around Holden’s age, and I sure as hell had a lot of teenage angst about the world. But I remembered my freshman English teacher saying that the book reads very differently when you’re an adult, so I decided to test his hypothesis.

I was going to reread everybody’s favorite (or least-favorite) high school English novel.

The first thing I noticed rereading Catcher in my late 20s is that the book is funny as hell. I’m certain that the nuances of Holden’s humor—particularly some of his sex jokes—flew over my head when I was fourteen, especially given that I would have been unfamiliar with much of the 1950s slang strewn throughout the book. As a more mature reader, however, I quickly pieced together that “flit” was a slang term for “homosexual” or that “necking” is equivalent to our modern "making out.” These nuances made the book a lot more enjoyable, and I often found myself laughing out loud at Holden’s hyperbolic outbursts.

As a Columbia alum, I particularly enjoyed the moment where Holden asks Carl Luce if he’s majoring in “perverts” at Columbia. That must be the most accurate nuance about Columbia I’ve ever heard in my life. Everyone’s majoring in perverts up there. No kidding.

The book also reads very differently after you’ve lived in New York. As a teenager from Chicago, I could only abstractly picture the Central Park pond with the ducks or the interior of the Natural History Museum—especially since Holden isn’t a particularly descriptive narrator. After ten years in New York, however, Holden’s entire journey through the city felt uniquely personal. I felt like I knew the pianist at Holden’s Greenwich Village Bar, and I understood exactly what sort of person Holden must have detested at Radio City. I could picture the exact exit Holden’s cab must have taken out of Central Park around 90th Street, and I even took my own engagement photos at the Central Park Mall where Phoebe used to rollerskate. These moments made the book feel very intimate, as if New York City became a character of its own. And I couldn’t help but resonate with Holden’s love-hate relationship with the city—even over seventy years later, every New Yorker knows that feeling about Manhattan.

Another detail that flew over my head as a teenager is the fact that Holden comes from an upper-class background and carries much of his upper-class guilt throughout the novel. He grows up on the Upper East Side—a fact that is never directly mentioned in the book but that any New Yorker can piece together in a second—and his grandmother sends him money four times a year because she can never remember his birthday. Holden goes to a fictional elite boarding school and gravitates in elite circles—his acquaintances go to Choate and Andover and Princeton and Columbia—and his dad is a corporate lawyer who funds his expensive lifestyle. He comes to Pencey Prep with leather suitcases and feels guilty that his roommate can afford only plastic ones. He donates ten dollars to a couple of nuns he meets in Grand Central Station (equivalent to over a hundred dollars today), and skips quarters on the frozen pond in Central Park as if they are disposable trinkets.

As a teenager, I would always be confused when people on the Internet or in my class would disparage Holden, but I realize now that much of the criticism that Holden gets from contemporary readers might stem from their inability to empathize with a “privileged” prep school kid. In our modern world, we have been taught to read books through the lens of privilege, and any sort of remotely privileged character is automatically unsympathetic. Rereading Catcher made me realize just how much contemporary literary criticism has infiltrated our understanding of the great works of literature—to the point where the financial status of Holden’s family works against him. When reading Catcher, however, I took away a different point—it is important that Holden is wealthy because part of his criticism of “phonies” stems from his realization that the world of wealth is largely performative. In this way, Holden is not just a whiny prep school kid but a teenager trying to be as authentic as possible in a world that elevates money and appearances over genuine human connection. The specific world he takes issue with is the sphere of boarding schools and Ivy League colleges and golf carts and leather suitcases. It isn’t that Holden isn’t aware of his “privilege” but that he could not care less for it because it detracts from his pursuit of authenticity.

If I had to choose one word to describe the book overall, in fact, it would be “authentic.” God, I wish we could still write books like this—I wish the literary gatekeepers would want to publish a book with absolutely no plot. The Catcher in the Rye is one of the realest books I’ve ever read precisely because it is about nothing more than a guy who wanders around New York for several days. There’s no suspense after the first chapter. There’s not even a formal rising action or resolution. We are left turning pages not because Holden leaves us with cliffhangers but because we care deeply about his inner world. Catcher is a direct testament to the fact that plot doesn’t really matter in literature—what matters are ideas.

And the novel is rife with ideas.

The most direct philosophical idea in Catcher comes from Mr. Antolini, Holden’s former English teacher who agrees to take Holden in for the night while likely harboring ulterior motives. Over coffee, Mr. Antolini tells Holden that “the mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” Along with the closing lines of the novel, this quote has always stuck with me, and I remember vehemently disagreeing with it at both the ages of fourteen and eighteen. I thought that I might have a different reaction to it now, but alas, I must still be immature, for I will always pick passionately dying for a cause I care about rather than sitting around humbly waiting for a change. Perhaps that makes me immature, or, perhaps, Salinger’s entire point is that we should not blindly follow the advice of a man who may or may not be a child molester.

Interestingly enough, several commenters online have pointed out that Mr. Antolini gives Holden “very sound” advice. I must, however, disagree with Antolini’s take on the world. His goal, of course, seems to be to get Holden back to school, but his point that “educated and scholarly men… tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative” doesn’t ring very true in my personal understanding of the universe. If anything, brilliance and creativity are all it takes to make a difference.

So I’m on Holden’s side here. The sort of education that Holden is subjected to is not for everyone. In fact, the very sort of education that Holden rails against is part of the same system that now teaches Catcher in virtually every single English classroom across America—the rigid “let’s-analyze-the-red-hunting-hat-symbol” education system that leaves most students with a sour taste in their mouths about literature. You can’t force anyone to like this book, and analyzing it certainly makes the problem worse. Catcher is one of the most beautiful and moving books I’ve ever read, and unfortunately, the majority of people who were forced to read it for sophomore English will walk away from the novel without apprehending its profundity.

I cried three times throughout the book as well—once in the first museum scene where Holden comments on permanence, once in the “catcher in the rye” bit in Phoebe’s bedroom, and once in the carousel scene in the penultimate chapter. There’s something haunting about the realization that what Holden loves most about the Museum of Natural History is that nothing in it changes—everything is in the same place every time you walk into it. The museum symbolizes the sort of permanence that Holden longs for and demonstrates the impossibility of attaining permanence in our ever-changing world. The tragedy of Holden Caulfield, then, is that he sees so much beauty in the world around him but that he is unable to come to terms with ephemerality.

Nonetheless, there is something beautiful and noble about Holden’s pursuit. He idolizes childhood, and rightly so—childhood is filled with authenticity and wonder, and it would do more adults well to embrace some of the childhood wonder that Holden aspires to preserve—to tear up in the little moments under the rain, watching a child in a blue coat on a merry-go-round.

What I took away this time from The Catcher in the Rye is not that Holden is an immature bastard—rather, what I learned was that in a world of phonies, there is still beauty left to be found. And that is why I cried alongside Holden in the final scene in Central Park, watching Phoebe on the carousel beneath the rain.

As for my crush on Holden Caulfield, it’s still there. Perhaps I am still in the stage of my life where I lament exiting childhood and getting older. Perhaps I’m still not ready to grow up. Perhaps I’ll revisit this book in my forties to see if it still makes me cry, but for now, at least, I am more in love with Holden than ever: looking at the world with childlike wonder, Holden sees beauty in our broken universe. And that is why The Catcher in the Rye remains one of my favorite books of all time—in a world of phonies and jerks, and bastards, Catcher argues that there is still hope for genuine people.

So maybe that’s why I’ve always loved Holden: he will remind me forever that authenticity and wonder are always worth fighting for.

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