JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield once seemed the universal voice of teenage angst, but now he’s too quaint for young people. Can we learn to love it again, asks Dana Czapnik

Here’s a thought. Teen angst, once regarded as stubbornly generic, is actually a product of each person’s unique circumstances: gender, race, class, era. Angst is universal, but the content of it is particular.

This might explain why Holden Caulfield, once the universal everyteen, does not speak to this generation in the way he’s spoken to young people in the past. Electric Literature gave this explanation of The Catcher in the Rye’s datedness: “If you’re a white, relatively affluent, permanently grouchy young man with no real problems at all, it’s extraordinarily relatable. The problem comes when you’re not. Where’s The Catcher in the Rye for the majority of readers who are too non-young, non-white, and non-male to be able to stand listening to Holden Caulfield feel sorry for himself?”

On the one hand, Yes! On the other, Oof!

I’ve had conversations about Catcher with undergraduate students in creative writing classes I’ve taught, and every one has complained about disliking Holden. In my limited network of young people, Catcher is not only no longer beloved, it has become something even more tragic: uncool.

But is it as simple as Electric Literature posits – that if you’re not white, privileged and male, it’s hard to see yourself in Holden? After all, this is partly why I wrote my coming-of-age novel The Falconer, told from the perspective of a young woman in early 1990s New York. Maybe hating on Holden has turned into its own form of adolescent rebellion. Catcher was an incendiary novel when it was first published and was banned from many school districts. Reading it once felt subversive; now it’s a reliable presence on most curriculums. And once adults tell you something’s good, aren’t you supposed to hate it?

But it’s not just girls and kids of colour who are turned off by Holden; I have found that my white, male students didn’t like him either.

I spoke with several New York City public school English teachers, who all confirmed my suspicion that it’s not just Holden’s identity that keeps him from resonating with younger readers – though that’s part of it.

Instead, broad shifts within culture have rendered Holden’s malaise annoying instead of resonant. For one thing, the concept of Holden’s total isolation from the adult world – the molten core of the novel – is anathema to kids who have come of age in a culture where they are precious and valued.

Reading Catcher at 21 was like bumping into an old crush and realising that everything you ever liked about them was a projection

In Salinger’s era, a struggling, depressed teen had to pick himself up by the bootstraps and be a man. The idea that he could wander through New York for a couple of days, unaccounted for, without any contact from an adult in his life must seem completely foreign to kids today, who are kept on tight leashes. A parent can watch their child’s exact geolocation from a handheld device. Holden had much more freedom, but it came with a heaping side order of neglect.

Though young people today are more carefully watched, they’re also looking out at the adult world and seeing very clearly that it has gone absolutely mad. How can one get all worked up about some “phony” classmate or a brother who sold out to Hollywood (is selling out even a thing any more?) when earlier that morning you did an active shooter drill in homeroom? Or when it’s possible the Earth might be uninhabitable within your lifetime and the grownups are doing nothing about it? Holden’s melancholia feels positively quaint in comparison to the problems kids face today.

I’ve read Catcher at a few different stages of my life, and it’s changed each time. First at the age of 13, as part of my education as a New York City kid attending a progressive private school on the Upper West Side (just a Central Park away from Holden’s stomping grounds), then again on my own at 17, when I was mainlining ennui and noticing how disappointing people were. So I fell in love.

When I was about to graduate college at 21 and feeling that morphine drip of nostalgia that accompanies points of departure in youth, I read Catcher again in search of my old friend. But by then, Holden’s appeal had worn off. I’d figured out sensitive and angry young men usually reserved their sensitivity for themselves. It was like bumping into an old crush and realising that everything you ever liked about them was a projection. After I turned the last page I thought, “What did I ever see in that guy?” As with most things in life, reading Catcher is all about timing.

I’m closer now to 40 than to 17. I no longer read to find friends in literature – I read for the writing. So when I recently read the book for the fourth time, I saw something brand new and I think closer to what Salinger intended: a perfectly written portrait of an imperfect character. Every syllable sings. Much of what I saw in this fourth reading, I had completely missed before.

Which puts Catcher in a bit of a Catch-22. Kids who are reading to fall in love with a book no longer relate to Holden, and adult readers who appreciate the craftsmanship are too old to be struck by it emotionally.

So, here’s my proposal to readers coming to The Catcher in the Rye for the first time now: read it as early as possible in your life. Read it alongside Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, Junot Díaz, Toni Morrison, André Aciman and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Hate it if you must. Rail against Holden. Call him a spoiled brat. When it comes to all the money and opportunity he squanders, he is! Let 20 years pass. Let the world wash over you, then read it again. You might see Holden for who he really is. Not a stand-in for every single teenager that ever walked the Earth, but a lonely individual who finds the injustices of the world intolerable.

• The Falconer by Dana Czapnik is out now (Faber & Faber)

