The Lord of the Phonies
Why read Jules Crittenden? Because of minirants like this:
One of my minor rants about high school reading lists is the inclusion of “Catcher” and “Lord of the Flies.” It just seems off target to enshrine the more ridiculous and baser aspects of adolescence by making them the subject of “literature” that’s institutionally enshrined for decades in the only reading list that most Americans have in common. I like “Romeo and Juliet,” with its message of “Adolescent excess gets you dead. Grow up already” and “Go to First Aid class and learn to take a pulse.”
If I were the kind of guy who could get away with saying, “You go, girl,” then I would.
Well, and also if Jules was a girl.
Seriously, though, the only reason people still read Salinger is so the government can track the whereabouts of its secret brainwashed assassins. Unless you’ve got a better theory?
James? You mean Jules.
I am proud to report that I have never read Catcher. I was not so lucky as to escape Lord of the Flies though.
Yikes! Thanks for the heads-up. Got it fixed.
We do seem to be getting our first names a bit muddled the last couple of days, don’t we?
I tend to prefer Paul Graham’s take on Lord of the Flies, actually:
If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn’t get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.
Having just lectured a bunch of my freshmen about the canon and what makes a work canonical, I extend an invitation to all of you to attend a class. I don’t know who was teaching you English literature, but they seem to have missed the point. If you think catcher and lotf are about silly things adolescents do, I suggest you reread both works.
And maybe come to class.
Speaking of missing the point…
I read Catcher and thought it was meh. Same with A Separate Peace. Though both were better than Great Expectations.
I was assigned Catcher and Peace and Flies in high school. Didn’t finish any of them. If the teacher ever made a point about what the books were about, I didn’t finish listening to him. I suspect I had already read more widely by that time than the teacher ever had.
A friend of mine cynically concluded that Catcher in the Rye was so popular because of its few pages. It took little time to actually read and write a book review. This allowed students to spend more time doing other things—like getting in trouble.
I hope Salinger is rotting in hell. He was a lecherous old bastard who poured lye on Joyce Maynard’s budding intellect.
I thought Catcher was beautifully crafted, but had mediocre content. Franny and Zoey was Salinger’s real masterpiece.
Still, Heinlein and Asimov did a lot more to help me grow up (insofar as that ever happened). It’s better to read about young men growing courage and intelligence than to read about their whiney existential angst.
I have a hard time deciding what was more painful in high school, “Catcher” or “Death of a Salesman” (which I argued was a comedy, not tragedy, since there was no heroism to fall from, and every character ended up better off at the end). It seemed as though Salinger’s story was approaching a point asymptotically – approaching, but never actually reaching.
I suppose the sophomoric writing style was designed to capture teenage angst. There is nothing interesting about teenage angst. Everyone goes through a stage where they are whiny and think no one has ever suffered as much as them. It’s a natural part of development, but so is an infant’s regurgitation – that doesn’t mean it’s intellectually meaningful.
I liked “Catcher in the Rye” from High School…never read “Lord of the Flies” but had to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. I’ll take Salinger.
Nathan, Asimov never was a good writer, nor was he a good storyteller. If you would like examples, Roger Zelazny & Jack Vance are good writers, while Jerry Pournelle and H. Beam Piper are very good storytellers, as is Alexandre Dumas. Poul Anderson is both, as is Terry Pratchett.
Come to think of it, J.K. Rowling qualifies as a decent storyteller herself.
After that there are older schools which would include Arthur Conan Doyle, Kipling, and Tolkien.
Now that I reflect, I found Tolstoy a more compelling writer than Salinger or Joyce. Never was subjected to Hemingway, but I’ve been told he’s pretty good.
Casey,
No, Asimov wasn’t a good storyteller. Especially not at first. But he told good stories! He had a great imagination, and the mind of a scientist. Makes up for prosaic prose, in my opinion. Great writers and great storytellers are one thing, but great stories are harder to come by.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in Texas, but we had a somewhat different reading lists. Never was required to read Catcher or Flies, though I did try to read Flies after school but never finished it.
We read stuff like Brave New World and Hound of the Baskervilles. We also had to read The Scarlet Letter, which is a punishment that should be strictly reserved for asshole high school jocks.
And I’m with Casey for the most part. And he mentioned some authors I’m not familiar with, so new reading to check out. Yay!
Catcher enshrines angst, lord of the flies depicts the savage nature of children.
Screw Catcher, Praise The Lord.
Frankly, I find it amusing to believe that kids read at all.
Apparently I left an open italics tag. I plead lack of caffeine.
I may be eviscerated for this, but Hemingway is mostly “meh”. Except for “Old Man and the Sea”, his writing is dreck. My father was an English Professor at the university level for 30 years, and actually preferred Hemingway’s shorts over his novels. I think EH didn’t have the patience to craft a novel, whereas his short stories fit perfectly within his attention span.
The reason OMatS is so good is that Hemingway actually focused on the art of writing for an extended period of time (after getting attacked repeatedly by his literary critics for churning out crap, he set out to prove them wrong). He reportedly rewrote portions of the novel over 50 times. And it shows. It is a masterpiece. Had he given the same amount of care to other said masterpieces, like “The Sun Also Rises”, “A Farewell to Arms”, etc., I think his posthumous reputation as a great novelist would be much more deserved. As it is, he was really nothing more than a hack (not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that!), who happened to catch people’s attention.
Fire in the hole! *ducks*
As an aside, but in much the same vein, I believe that some “classics” are wasted on high school students since many times they don’t have the life experiences to identify with the characters. My personal example is “The Great Gatsby”, I was forced to “read” it in high school, took the test, made the grade, and prompt forget all about it. In my early 30′s I rediscover it, and identified with several aspects of the characters, their motivations were clearer, the actions more understandable and in the context of many of my more recently acquired life experiences.
Looking back, I think this happens alot, students are forced to consume stories that they don’t comprehend, and characters that they cant identify with. It poisons the well for the rest of their lives.