J.D. Salinger's cult novel The Catcher in the Rye is about being a teenager, isn't it? Its narrator, seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield, is the prototype of the teenage rebel, the bolshie misfit, full of self-indulgent angst, and contempt for the "phoney" adult world: he's every-teen, isn't he? As I see it, this is a lazy orthodoxy. It implies that his disaffection is general, unfocused, the common denominator of all adolescent angst. It also nudges him into line with sixties-style rebellion, centred on sexual liberation.
The "every-teen" image obscures the fact that Holden's crisis is rooted in a specific anxiety, one that is not normally seen as central to the adolescent psyche. His anxiety is that sex is a threat to authenticity. This is what animates the book, and I think explains its uniqueness.
What causes Holden to run away from his boarding-school is a sexual crisis. His older room-mate has been on a date with a girl that Holden knows, and is platonically attached to. This banal jock, Stradlater, tends to schmooze his dates into full submission: "He was unscrupulous. He really was." Holden is torn between his aversion to this macho attitude to girls, and his uneasy sense that maybe he has to imitate it, to conform. This tension is what drives the narrative voice, with its oscillation between streetwise boasting and unworldly boyish honesty.
He tries to exorcise his innocence by hiring a prostitute, but can't go through with it. He wonders how he can learn to separate love and sex, in order to get experienced, and how he can kick the inconveniently innocent habit of seeing girls as human beings rather than stepping stones to the acquisition of sexual confidence. His antipathy towards culture in general is based in his sense that it conspires in a flippant, conformist attitude to sex, partly by means of Hollywood.
In the latter half of the book he expresses a more general desire to protect innocence from dirty adult falsity, but this Romantic yearning flows from his sexual anxiety. So the novel is not about teenage angst in general. At its heart is this very specific experience of feeling spiritually threatened by the power of sexual peer-pressure, this fear that sexual maturity entails a sacrifice of one's moral integrity.
A key reason for the novel's enduring cult-status, I suggest, is that this anxiety became more prevalent, with the sexual revolution, but increasingly hard to speak about. For the master-narrative of the sexual revolution is that conformity belongs only to the repressed past, not to the liberated present. And this dominant ideology has proved very hard to question; those who question it are so easily labelled reactionaries, prudes. Novelists, and other artists and thinkers, have overwhelmingly failed to develop Salinger's insight, that sex can be the site of a conformity that feels soul-killing. The sexual frankness of someone like John Updike is not fundamentally questioning of the ideology of sexual liberation but in thrall to it. (The same goes for Martin Amis, whose teenage hero in The Rachel Papers is a sort of slick, soulless Holden.)
So please: no more clichés about this being the sacred text of teenage rebellion, adolescent angst. This view robs the novel of its daring particularity. The reality is that it uses the setting of teenage rebellion in order to tackle a profound issue, the tension between sexual conformism and morality. It does so with a raw spiritual courage that exposes just about all subsequent novelists as a bunch of phoneys.
