When I read The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, I was underwhelmed. I don't remember much of the book. Only three images stuck in my mind: Holden Caulfield on the train to New York, Holden on the phone in his hotel room and the title image: Holden as the catcher in the rye. Other than that, I remember only that I was disappointed. So many people had told me to read the book. Many of them seemed to feel an affinity with Holden Caulfield. I didn't feel that kinship with Holden, and the book as a whole came nowhere near meeting my expectations. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't love it either.

Rereading it now is an entirely different experience. I went in curious about what had changed in the thirty years (has it really been that long?) since I last read the book.

I was immediately struck by the voice: a pitch-perfect 1950s teenagers. It's hard to believe that Salinger wrote this in his thirties. As I read more, I realized that it felt like a twelve or thirteen year old, not a sixteen year old. While Holden is by his own admission immature, and several of the people he encounters tell him this, nothing in the book reinforces that Holden is frozen in time as much as his own words and the way he uses them.

For the first half of the book, I had this nagging feeling: there was something disturbingly familiar about Holden's voice: the repetition of key phrases, the hyperbole, the high praise for some and the ability to dismiss so many as morons and phonies, the way he spoke about women. Yes, it pointed to Holden's immaturity, but it also brought to mind the Twitter stream of a current individual who has risen to the heights of power. It's remarkable that these words that were so carefully crafted to represent the thoughts of an immature sixteen year old could at times sound exactly like the way the most power person in the world has chosen to represent himself on Twitter.

I couldn't shake this feeling for the first half of the book, and it affected the way I felt about Holden, but things started to change in the second half of the book. As Holden's attempts to find human companionship became more and more desperate, as he almost as desperately pushed many of those same people away, I felt like I was beginning to feel differently about Holden. I began to hope that Holden could find that he was looking for. I wanted Holden to find the person who could talk him through what he was unable to go through himself.

The images that stayed with me—Holden on the train talking to a woman, Holden on the phone in his hotel room, Holden as the catcher in the rye—weren't just random images. Each of those images captured Holden's predicament. They weren't the only images that did. I wonder now why other images—his brother's baseball glove, the ducks and the frozen lake—didn't stay with me over the years.

As I came to the end of the book, I had the realization, obvious in hindsight, that it wasn't Holden who was the catcher in the rye. As much as he may have wished he'd been able to, it wasn't Holden who needed to do the catching. It was Holden who needed to be caught, who needed someone to stop him "going over the edge."

That realization was the difference. I missed it the first time around and was underwhelmed as a result. Strangely enough, I was probably too much like Holden as a teenager to appreciate the book. It isn't so much about feeling an affinity with Holden, it's hoping that he finds someone to catch him. I'm glad that I've come back to it after all these years. Having finished the book, it makes perfect sense that Salinger wrote it in this thirties, but that doesn't make it any less remarkable.