How to Deal with Popular Teen Books that Contain Actions Unpopular with Me

A hazard of having kids whose reading you can't keep up with: sometimes they read things you'd prefer them not to read.

One of the boys just finished The Catcher in the Rye. I'd meant to reread this when Salinger died, but I never got around to it. My son picked it up and read it and left it lying around, so I finally picked it up and reread it. Oops. I had forgotten about how foul Holden's vocabulary is. I had forgotten his interest in sex, except his sterile encounter with a prostitute. How do you forget so much of a book, especially so much that you'd think you'd remember?

On the one hand, I'm comforted by the fact that reading Catcher in the Rye didn't scar me as a teenager. I talked to my son about it, and he mostly was surprised this book was regarded as a classic, that so many people liked it because he didn't think that it was so great. He apparently didn't identify with Holden, the disillusioned adolescent, or at least he didn't admit that he did. I think I had more sympathy as a teen for Holden's disregard for phonies. My son diagnosed Holden's mental illness early on.  Are readers of Catcher in 2014 more attuned to mental illness than the audience for whom it was written sixty years ago?

The other book I picked up from the kids' reading pile was John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. I'd heard this book is the big teen read, and it's being made into a movie, and author Green is also a fellow Hoosier, so I've had this book on my to-read list for awhile out of curiosity. It's the story of two cancer-ridden teenagers who fall in love. My sixth grade daughter brought it home from the school library.  She'd only read two chapters. Thank goodness. I blazed through it last night, all the while in the back of my mind scripting "the talk" I needed to have with her. In the first chapter, one of the characters is observed making out with his girlfriend, kissing and feeling her up. Later in the book, the two main characters consummate their love after they first express it. The boy has to remove his prosthetic leg so the scene isn't too titillating, but still. I get why teens love it: star-crossed young lovers search for the meaning of life while they fall in love, talk wittily to each other, and get to visit Amsterdam.  They discuss their skepticism about a hereafter and about whether life has meaning.  Their conclusion is that their lives have meaning because the "universe wants to be noticed." Their heroism lies not in great sacrifices or great courage or great nobility, but in paying attention, noticing the universe and the people they love. The boy, Gus, admires the way Hazel, though she has done nothing notable with her 16 years, has tread lightly on the earth. Their courageousness lies in falling in love even though they know they are "grenades" who will hurt each other by dying, but they decide the pain is worth the joy.

There are a lot of quote graphics related to this book - more interesting than the cover

The author writes about how he came up with the idea while he was working as a chaplain in the cancer ward at a children's hospital. He wanted to write a book that wasn't sentimental about the children he met there. They were funny and normal, not always wise and beyond-their-years. The book isn't as sappy as it could have been, but it plays to popular ideas, and so strikes me as sentimental and predictable. I appreciate the book's affirmation that even brief lives have meaning and purpose, but it isn't exactly grounded in faith. Faith is presented as an option, but the main characters are skeptics. Teens having sex seems to be a given. I don't want my eleven year old to read it. The challenge: asking her to turn it in without encouraging her to read it on the sly.

So when she came home from school, I asked her to walk to the corner store with me. "Is this about the book? Are we going to have 'the talk'?" she asked. Very perceptive. Actually, the whole ordeal went very well. When I asked her what sex was, she thought it was kissing and making out. "Weird," was her evaluation of what I told her to correct her misperceptions.  Afterwards, I thought of a bunch of things we still need to talk about - fertility monitoring, for instance. But she did tell me she didn't really care if she read the book or not.

Ironically, that afternoon, one of the high schoolers came home and pulled the book out of his backpack and told me his friends who are girls want him to read it.  He offered to loan it to me, not knowing I had read it the night before.  I told him it had parts in it I objected to, and he said he could guess what.  We actually had a pretty good little discussion about whether the author was trying to write a good book or a book that readers call "good."  Ahh, the joys of parenting.

RIP J. D. Salinger

I just heard on the radio today that J. D. Salinger, exacerbator of teenage angst, has died at age 91. Apparently he was following a diet to live until 120.  When as a teenager, I discovered Salinger, I devoured all his stories I could get my hands on.  Will I encourage my almost 13 year old to read him? Definitely not. Will I prevent him if some day he picks up Catcher in the Rye to read? Probably not.  It's a part of cultural history.  Was Salinger a genius? Probably. Has he lowered the standards of what is taught in high school English class so that teachers look for empathetic characters instead of good literature? I think you could argue that. I should probably reread something by him before saying any more, but Holden Caulfield and all his imitations irritate me as a parent. I guess I'm one of those phonies now. 

More high school reading

Watched Field of Dreams with the kids on Friday. They were bored at the beginning - only the older 2 care anything about baseball - but once the ghost players appeared, their interest picked up. The subtext about the reclusive author Terence Mann started a conversation after the show. When Kevin Costner's wife stands up at the school board meeting and makes an impassioned defense of Mann's book, I was worried a minute – wait, who is this author? How did I miss this guy? Kids asked about him, so we hit up trusty Google and found he doesn’t exist. Phew. I thought I had missed something.

But what I missed the first and only time I saw this movie was the implications of the wife’s speech. When I saw this movie in high school, I probably cheered the wife on. But now as a parent, I pause. I wouldn't support government censorship, but mostly because I think the government will censor the wrong things. On the other hand, I don’t think school kids should be handed every book that is praised as a coming of age manifesto. Mann apparently is based loosely on J. D  Salinger. Catcher in the Rye is a book for adults who have already lost their innocence, not kids who are still trying to figure things out. Why not feed them more challenging books with rich vocabulary, more complex characters, and longlasting value? Make them read the classics they won’t have time or desire to read on their own. They’ll find Catcher in the Rye on their own; it doesn’t need to be assigned in class.

Then again, I can see an argument for knowing what books are being talked about, what books people are interested in,what books have influence.  But how many high school students have critical skills to discern good writing from popular writing?

I suppose I should add Catcher in the Rye to my to reread list, because all I can remember of it is Holden's self-absorption and visit to a prostitute.