among the innocent
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Thu, 26 Aug 1999 00:49:16 -0400
Many times, certainly on this list, people have commented on Holden
Caulfield's obsession with children, with saving them, with spending
time with them. There have been more than a few suggestions that his
interest is unsavory.
This week's issue of The New York Times Magazine (August 22) has a
special section about "The Troubled Life of Boys," focusing on the
outsiders, the loners, the bullied, the harrased. It's
blood-curdling, it's a 1990s version of the venom between Holden and
his classmates at Pencey Prep, and one story, "The Outsiders" (pp.
36-41) ends with a girl describing her former boyfriend, "J.," both
of them high-school students.
The girl says, "There are times I can talk to him about things,
without it being weird and without him being a pervert." Then the
author (Adrian Nicole LeBlanc) concludes: "It's all relative. When
you are close to the bottom, there's not much room left to fit. [The
former girlfriend] recalls J. at his happiest during a class he
described to her, in the high school's on-site preschool, how content
he felt playing among the little kids."
"Close to the bottom." That certainly sounds like a point Holden
reaches -- and in the brutality documented in this issue of the
magazine, you can see traces of the (mostly physical, here)
mistreatment and alienating actions that cause Holden to withdraw as
badly as he does.
But that image of "J." at his happiest among the little kids, the
ones who would not taunt him or bully him, is eerily reminiscent of
so much of Holden's behavior as we talk about it here. Has anyone
else seen this issue? Who would have guessed that a kind of
real-life Catcher for the 1990s could step off the page so vividly?
--tim