Re: among the innocent

Camille Scaysbrook (c_scaysbrook@yahoo.com)
Thu, 26 Aug 1999 17:33:53 +1000 

Tim - I'd love to have a read of this - is it anywhere to be found in
Cyberspace?

thanks,

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com

> 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
> 
> 
> 


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