Reporter Ken Valenti and I held an email discussion this week about Holden Caulfield, the art of literature and how times have changed.

Here’s how the conversation started. This is from Ken’s message to me:

There was an essay in the NY Times yesterday about Catcher in the Rye. Apparently teens and young adults hate the book now. They can’t identify with this loser who is detached from society. He’s just a whiny dropout who can’t cope. They identify more with Harry Potter, the geeky guy who fights the noble fight and wins. (I mean, they call Harry geeky, and he’s certainly drawn that way on the covers of the books, though I never really thought of him as a geek as he comes across on the pages of the books.)

But Holden Caulfield, they have no patience for. One teacher said her students wanted to tell him; “Just shut up and take your Prozac.”

And you know, I noticed something similar in my non-fiction class at Manhattanville a year ago. We read this essay I really liked by Joan Didion on her first time living in Manhattan, getting a job at a magazine. The tone of the article was unhappy and unsettled. (Imagine that from Joan Didion.) Of course, it’s really well-written. Didion can write rings around most living writers. Some passages were actually beautiful, if I remember correctly.

But one woman in our class, in her early 20s, couldn’t stand it. She felt, Who is this whiny (woman) to complain about her life? She comes to Manhattan, gets a decent job. What’s her problem?

So. No sympathy for someone who simply feels disconnected from society at large. Got a problem? Unless it’s an external force — like an evil wizard out to do you in — then it is just that; YOUR problem. Don’t bother us with it.

Here’s the top of my response:

Well, it’s not the 1950s any more, and children are being raised differently. They’ve been brought up on empowerment, ego and success-is-yours-for-the-asking, anything-you-want-you-can-do/get; it’s not a repressive, sexist, racist mindset among the 20-somethings and 30-somethings, so rebelling against the status quo intellectually does seem to be about whining instead of winning. I dunno if that’s all that bad, but it does cut off people from some of the past’s good writing. I frankly don’t like to spend my time reading about people I want to slap upside the head (one reason I don’t read modern novels). I don’t find it entertaining and I have no patience with them. I want sweeping drama, Good vs Evil (like in the video games), not ‘I broke my nail, my job sucks, life is over, let me commit suicide!!!! stories.

I just finished a collection of Dorothy Parker short stories and poems. It was published in 1944 and designed for our troops overseas, a pocket Dorothy Parker with a foreward by W. Somerset Maugham.
Each story is a massive downer. If I were a troop and read these things, I’d wander out into crossfire. What was she thinking? What were her editors thinking? Or are we so less sophisticated these days? The stories are clever, well-written and, as Maugham said, when they’re over, you have no questions. You know these people and you know what happens to them. But the people!

….

There was more of the discussion, and if anybody is interested, i can copy and paste the rest of it in. But it made me think, and I brought the discussion to the dinner table last night to question my youngest, who read “Catcher in the Rye” for her high school English class this year and found it, well, whiny.

“Teens naturally whine,” she told me. “So he was really like everybody else, which was one of the points of the book, right? That he connects with all teens. They just don’t admit it.”

I dunno. Any thoughts?