Seventy-five years ago this week, J.D. Salinger released a novel that, according to one exasperated parent, included 237 uses of “goddamn”, 58 of “bastard” and 31 of “chrissakes”. The Catcher in the Rye has since sold more than 65 million copies, but the debate over its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has only sharpened. On the anniversary, two UK publications offer strikingly different portraits: the New Statesman calls Holden “a Christ-figure, half-human, half-divine”, while UnHerd brands him “the original incel” and argues the novel is “a prehistory of the online male voice”.
Holden is a 16-year-old scrawny virgin dropout in a deerstalker hat, narrating three days after being kicked out of prep school. His account – littered with “I means” and “and alls” – takes in prostitutes, underage drinking and a memorable bout of flatulence. For the New Statesman, the novel’s assaults on sanctimony have been reduced to Salinger’s war trauma; the author himself has been depicted “as a phony for being creepy with teenaged female admirers”. The novel was even blamed for the 1980 murder of John Lennon, whose assassin, Mark David Chapman, identified Lennon with Holden’s definition of a faker.
“On its 75th anniversary, The Catcher in the Rye is hailed as a Christ-figure story and condemned as the original incel novel.”
UnHerd sees Holden’s moral world as identical to a Redditor’s: “confessional, digressive, accusatory, and self-pitying”, with a private taxonomy of “phonies”. The poster holds all authenticity; everyone else is a sell-out. This worldview, the writer claims, now maps directly onto internet-native young people – a bestiary of “NPCs, normies, mids, soys, feds”. Holden’s peculiar misanthropy, his wounded disaffection, “is the internet’s house style”, the piece states. Even the novel’s adults are grotesque, like the “perverts and morons” who cross-dress or spit water in a midtown hotel window.
Both readings, for all their divergence, suggest the novel remains urgently legible. The New Statesman argues that “you can assess a culture by the way it responds to a major literary work”. If so, the culture of 2026 – caught between reverence and revulsion – is still speaking through Holden Caulfield.