The Catcher in the Rye
Holden Caulfield is impossibly irritating and completely right. Salinger invented the voice of adolescent alienation in 1951, and it still speaks to readers decades past their adolescence. The authentic disdain for phoniness is itself a philosophical position. It has been banned more than almost any other American novel, which tells you something.
"Holden is the worst character in the English language." "His train of thought is annoying and repetitive," adds another: everyone a phony except the boy running the audit, strangers sized up by their luggage. The insight underneath gets weighed and returned: "that's the kind of insight a sixteen year old considers deep." The crises look small against the money cushioning them, "the well-fed despondence of the white man" in one reader's phrase, and the classroom canonization grates hardest: teachers keep presenting "twaddle," in one reader's word, as subversive and meaningful. Nothing happens, the ending changes nothing, and adults who loved it at sixteen keep reporting the same curdling on reread, which suggests the book needs the reader at a particular age more than the reader ever needed the book.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
