It’s been a long time since I devoured a book in one sitting, and boy does it feel satisfying. As the title makes obvious, I read “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.B Salinger. Maybe it was the writing style, maybe it was the long gap which got to me, but I found it to be phenomenal. It’s quite short (finished it in about 3 hours).

The thing about this book is, it is not a description of events- atleast not completely. It’s just follows the protagonist’s stream of conciousness, as it jumps from incidents in his past, people he liked and hated, and childhood traumas. The protagonist is this 4-times expelled, 16 year old schoolboy with wealthy parents with a thousand vices, called Holden Caulfield. He kind of tells the story of his descent into depression and madness, caused partially by his troubled past and the convoluted way in which his mind works.

Holden has a hundred vices- using intoxiants as a minor being the least of them. He is a habitual liar, highly skilled at constructing falsehoods and making them believable. Throughout the story he judges people as “phonies”. That’s his label for people being something they aren’t just to achieve some end, while being one himself. What redeems him is his brutal honesty to himself, and his intense suffering for failing to do right.

The events depicted are straightforward- a boy expelled from a prestigious school loafs around in New York for four days, sinking deeper and deeper into the tar pit of depression. Over those four days, we follow his thoughts in first person, as he talks about his dead younger brother Allie, whose baseball mitt which has poetry written on it, numerous roommates from the schools he got expelled from, and his apt observations about what is wrong with people.

Besides the content itself, the way author employs slang, and his “window into the protagonist’s mind” style are things I have seen nowhere else.