Book Review (Rucksack): The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye

Written by J.D. Salinger in 1951

The Raccoon: After getting expelled from yet another private school, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield runs away and wanders the streets of New York.  Salinger’s famous novel is about coming to terms rather than coming of age, as Holden struggles to accept that he is growing up.

UNMASKED: The Catcher in the Rye has been a polarizing work since the moment it was published.  Holden is a sarcastic, immature, and frequently unreliable narrator, a stylistic choice by Salinger that I personally couldn’t work through.  Consequently, I hated The Catcher in the Rye.  If you can embrace Holden for his numerous faults, however, then you may find the narrator and his story endearing.

The narrative unfolds over the course of only three days, with nothing objectively important filling that time.  Add to that Holden’s frequent digressions and criticisms, and the novel ends up reading more as a running commentary than a sequence of developing events.  This, I believe, is Salinger’s purpose in telling the story: to show people’s disillusionment in the 1950s with life and society through the mind of a teenager.  The author uses the feelings of nihilism and estrangement that most teens already experience as a lens to examine what many veterans struggled with in the years following World War II.

Where does this leave the reader?  We are swept up into the frivolous struggles of a sick boy; perhaps simply sick of how artificial the people around him act, but by the end of the novel are expected to understand that he is neither mentally nor physically healthy either.  Holden reacts strongly to events that have no meaning to anyone else, a further commentary from the author on how useless the war was.

Salinger concludes The Catcher in the Rye with only a half-hearted resolution to Holden’s story, and I found myself wondering what the point was.  Yet, the novel’s strength lies in its lessons rather than its plot.  The reader is so occupied with Holden that he/she does not even realize until long past putting the book down that Holden’s behavior and emotions are tools, carefully placed and designed to show that change is inevitable and that no issue is black and white.

Strengths:

• Salinger brings the reader into the narrator’s head so effectively that the character of Holden stays with him/her for life.

Weaknesses:

• Only one other character, Holden’s sister Phoebe, is mentioned in more than one scene, and she has no development outside of Holden’s own changing view of her.
• Holden’s tangents take away from the reader’s understanding of events, just as often as they add to it.

Rating: 11/20 ducks

Ideal Setting: Read this when you feel alienated.  Sometimes the boxes that we try so hard to fit into are just in our heads.

CANDY BOX: An Open Letter to Hannah Baker

An Open Letter to Hannah Baker, catalyst and second narrator of Thirteen Reasons Why

Spoiler warning: various plot points of Thirteen Reasons Why

Hannah, the criticism around your story right now is that it romanticizes mental illness. Furthermore, you are accused of thinking you were a martyr and of justifying suicide as a method of dealing with your problems.  I want you to know that I believe neither of these claims is true.

Obviously, killing yourself was not an intelligent choice.  You were only eighteen, and almost none of the issues you were facing would have followed you out of high school.  Moreover, you closed yourself off from receiving help at almost every opportunity.  For example, Clay specifically made the effort to open up to you and encourage you to do the same, and you chose to remain in your depression instead of letting him help you out.  You also only spoke to one adult, and even then you walked into the conversation expecting and encouraging it to fail.  Your situation was only hopeless because you painted it that way, and you denied countless other resources that could have helped you back onto your feet.

Nevertheless, it is rude of everyone to claim that you only committed suicide because you wanted to be seen as a hero.  You simply felt that you had no one to turn to, which I would venture to say is one of the most damaging, crushing mindsets someone could fall into.  We’re a tribal species; feeling emotionally misunderstood and isolated will drive anyone to desperation.  In a way, your suicide was a final attempt at improving your life; the only thing you could hold onto was the belief that leaving a message would allow others to finally see your perspective and disprove the rumors about you.

The overarching message of your story is that we need to be aware of how our actions and words can affect others, even when we don’t intend to be hurtful.  Yet this was not your personal goal in telling it.  While I am sure you hoped that you could convince everyone you mentioned on the tapes to change their behavior and their awareness moving forward, I don’t think you expected that most, if any, of them would fundamentally change their way of life.  The tapes are not a revenge quest either.  Although you taunt Tyler and Bryce, the people with the most harmful secrets, by reminding them that trying to stop the spread of the tapes will ensure that the entire school will find out what they did, the important part for you was simply ensuring that at least one other person found out.  You didn’t want to be keeping it all in.

What you wanted was simply acknowledgment.  Not communication; you still weren’t ready for that.  Had you been willing to fully communicate with someone, you could have worked through your issues and come out alive.  You just needed to know that someone was listening.

Suicide was the wrong choice, Hannah.  But I’m going to keep telling people to read Thirteen Reasons Why because you never truly justify your actions or ask anyone to agree with you.  Your tapes were a cry for help, and we need to learn from both the problems and situations you faced and the ways you found to avoid dealing with them.  The controversy around your story, like your troubled life, cannot be fixed by denial and censorship.  It can only be resolved with open communication.

Sincerely,

Jonah

Book Review (Canon): Nemesis

Nemesis

Written by Brendan Reichs in 2017

The Raccoon: Every two years on her birthday, Min Wilder is murdered, only to wake up in a forest clearing several hours later, completely unscathed.  After realizing that others around her know more about her situation than they are letting on, Min uncovers a far-reaching conspiracy that may just tie a strange inoculation shot she received in elementary school to the asteroid currently headed toward Earth.

UNMASKED: Nemesis is full of unique and earth-shattering ideas, each capable of carrying its own novel: a potential human extinction event, a string of reversible murders, a government conspiracy, a simulated world, and a cryptic warning of “Phase Two.”  When stuffed together, however, these concepts all lose their hold on the reader.

As a whole, Nemesis follows a downward slope.  The first few chapters establish three distinct characters, whose actions and dialogue flesh out their personalities, and the transition of the character Noah from Min’s view of him--the quiet background member of a group of bullies--to being the story’s second narrator, was an exciting surprise.  Yet, as the story goes on, Reichs resorts to classic tropes, such as a love triangle between a teen female narrator and the two boys closest to her, and the book’s ending is disappointingly familiar to the ending of The Maze Runner.

Ultimately, Nemesis, with its beautifully laid foundation, had the potential to rise as the next stunning dystopian series.  However, the novel trips over itself by trying to be everything at once.

Strengths:

• Reichs displays a talent for showing characters’ emotions and motivations.

Weaknesses:

• I found myself still asking questions long after the characters were satisfied with the answers, and there are a couple glaring plot holes remaining at the novel’s conclusion.
• Certain characters’ actions stretch too far from their previously established personalities and fears.
• The dialogue contains several cultural references, almost all of which are unnecessary and will likely make Nemesis much more difficult to read in a decade.

Rating: 10/20 betas

Ideal Setting: Read this if you ever begin to worry about a potential pattern to global extinction events.  Nemesis may just prove to be a true story. https://www.space.com/22538-nemesis-star.html