Shut Up, Holden Poem by gershon hepner

“Shut up, Holden, take
your Prozac, ” shout young people. I
this a great mistake,
since now grown up he catches rye.
He’s now become suburban,
and his malaise is now far more mature,
for he, while sipping bourbon,
is no more looking for a futile cure.
They’ve told him, “Get a life! ”
and he obliged them very long ago,
and got himself a wife, .
The rest is history, as we all know.


Inspired by an article by Jennifer Schuessler on the attempt by a Swedish writer who calls himself J.D. California to publish a sequel of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” (“Get a Life, Holden, ” NYT, June 21,2009) :
Until the judge makes her final ruling, Mr. Salinger’s fans will be spared the prospect of encountering Holden Caulfield, the ultimate alienated teenager, as a lonely old codger who escapes from a retirement home and his beloved younger sister, Phoebe, as a drug addict sinking into dementia. But Holden may have bigger problems than the insults of irreverent parodists and other “phonies, ” as Holden would put it. Even as Mr. Salinger, who is 90 and in ailing health, seeks to keep control of his most famous creation, there are signs that Holden may be losing his grip on the kids. “The Catcher in the Rye, ” published in 1951, is still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers. Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird, ” “whiny” and “immature.” The alienated teenager has lost much of his novelty, said Ariel Levenson, an English teacher at the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Holden’s home turf. She added that even the students who liked the book tend to find the language — “phony, ” “her hands were lousy with rocks, ” the relentless “goddams” — grating and dated. “Holden Caulfield is supposed to be this paradigmatic teenager we can all relate to, but we don’t really speak this way or talk about these things, ” Ms. Levenson said, summarizing a typical response. At the public charter school where she used to teach, she said, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’ ”..
Some critics say that if Holden is less popular these days, the fault lies with our own impatience with the idea of a lifelong quest for identity and meaning that Holden represents. Barbara Feinberg, an expert on children’s literature who has observed numerous class discussions of “Catcher, ” pointed to a story about a Holden-loving loser in the Onion headlined “Search for Self Called Off After 38 Years.” “Holden is somewhat a victim of the current trend in applying ever more mechanistic approaches to understanding human behavior, ” Ms. Feinberg wrote in an e-mail message. “Compared to the early 1950s, there is not as much room for the adolescent search, for intuition, for empathy, for the mystery of the unconscious and the deliverance made possible through talking to another person.” Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”


6/21/09