Caught in the rye

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines- Mia Judicpa, 17, is an incoming freshman at UP-Visayas. She was an editor at her grade school and high school papers. She’s taking up a pre-med course and is hoping to become a doctor-slash-writer, among other considerably sensible dreams. She blogs at miajudicpa.blogspot.com.

It was an excruciatingly typical summer day when I passed by the living room to find my sister watching a movie that usually attracts an audience of middle-aged couch potatoes. This doesn’t quite happen a lot so I decided to join her. I had to make sure her thought process was still suggestive of her characteristic taste in kids’ shows; for all I know, she wouldn’t have fallen into the category of alternative film enthusiast even if we locked her in a room full of Hitchcock films.

On the idiot box, the 2009 movie My One and Only was showing and Logan Lerman, the sole reason why I survived a full hour of greasy Hollywood scenes, was having a fight with his onscreen mother, Renée Zellweger. I remember George (Lerman) accusing Anne Deveraux (Zellweger) of being neglectful. The camera is shaky, shifting frames between George and his mother fast, and the tension is surreal. He asks his mother what his shoe size and favorite book are because she really has no idea and he thinks persecution by way of emotional hot plate will teach her a thing or two about parenthood.

“It’s Catcher in the Rye,” says George with a face reminiscent of stomach trouble. Naturally, I took that as a cue to finally get myself a copy of the book.

Probably everyone who is reading has read or heard of this novel. It might have been mentioned by your high school English teacher, in a different book, in Time’s 2005 list of the 100 best English novels written since 1923, or more likely, by an actor you happen to find easy on the eye. The Catcher in the Rye has been criticized because its average profanity count is at least three obscenities per page and the presentation of then-controversial teen issues is so explicit it’s just plain mental.

It is December 1949 and Holden Caulfield just got expelled from Pencey. It’s not because he is a dimwit; although, technically, he did take the unfortunate ax in all of his subjects except English. This is the third time he finds himself in such a predicament. He worries about his mother, but he is more thankful that he can finally get out of that sorry excuse for a school, where practically every student is phony and superficial, and all they ever do in speech class is yell “Digression!” to anyone who likes to talk about a wide spectrum of things during public speaking. He gets into a fistfight with his egocentric roommate Stradlater, Narcissus’ only deserving contender in beauty pageants, and ends up sleeping in unsociable Ackley’s room.

However, Holden is restless the same way every lost adolescent is, and walks out of the Pencey dormitory with his bags, a loaded wallet and a sore mindset. He just about hates the world now and here the misadventures begin. From hate, it seems, stems all the exciting things.

Reading The Catcher in the Rye is like enrolling yourself in a class that teaches you about the gloomier side of life. At least, that’s how I felt. I like reading morose books about social issues like Charles Bock’s wonderful debut novel Beautiful Children, where the characters have sociopathic issues and engage in drugs and pornography, and Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque, which divulges a crime that happens in a world where prostitution is synonymous to power. But these novels all have adults taking the hard blows of life. The Catcher in the Rye has Holden, who is barely out of high school.

In a span of three days, he has fist fights with his own roommate and a pimp, buys time with a young prostitute who takes five more dollars on top of the original payment they agreed on, meets up with his old girlfriend and gets slapped across the face for insulting her, gets drunk hard, finds his most favored teacher petting him in the middle of the night and, ultimately, stands under the pouring rain with his head in a total heap of unfathomable happiness. Here Holden is, the world’s icon for teenage rebellion, and the only thing I’ve ever done that qualifies as an act of defiance is slapping one of my grade school classmates, after which I cried out of guilt.

Holden is the classic archetype of the tragic character. Despite his salient distaste for the hypocrisy of every person around him, he harbors feelings of loathing towards himself, too. I particularly like him because of his honest deliberations — though he calls himself dumb vis-à-vis his siblings, he makes an intelligent scrutiny of certain things. I have to admit I’d love to have a friend as interesting as him, with his distorted view of the world and impulsive fantasies.

There’s a little bit of Holden in every teenager, I guess. There is always a part of us that hates the world for being “phony” even though we ourselves are guilty of that. There is always that longing to find the purpose for our births, why we are being kept on earth in the first place, and what happens after we grow into adulthood and experience that other universe. And in the midst of the flurry of events, we do mindless things like spend on impulse, drunk-dial old mates, indulge in prohibited things just for the hell of it, and give in to peer pressure. We dream of escaping the mess we make and leave it there for someone else to clean up. The harder we fall into adulthood, the more cynical we get. That’s why Holden wants to become the catcher in the rye, holding out his arms for children who fall off the cliff. He wants to save what little innocence the world lavishly throws away.

There are a number of books that, upon finishing them, leave you feeling so depressed you won’t read another book for weeks. But what makes The Catcher in the Rye different is the frank, simple words Salinger used to tell the complicated frustrations of adolescence. I found the book in a prominent bookstore among other so-called classic novels occupying a number of shelves. The copy I bought is a paperback, with blocks of splotchy text against yellowish pages that stimulate a gag reflex whenever you read. The cover isn’t anything to be proud of but heck, what’s in it is a completely different story. Pun intended.

A friend of mine asked me when he found out I was reading the book, “Isn’t that banned?”

I thought to myself,, quoting Holden though not verbatim, Boy that killed me. It really did.