I finally got around to reading The Catcher in the Rye, and I have questions. (SPOILERS)

[Ohio Dem]

Ok, first of all, I really thought the way the book would end would be that Holden would realize just how damn good he had it. What with the private schools, a maid, etc. I thought that he would quit being such a miserable little prick. But that isn't what happened. All that happened was his rich parents got him a psychiatrist, right?

So my questions are: What is this book's point? That even rich kids have angst?

Why is this considered such a great book? Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading it, once I got used to its style. But still...

I know I must be missing something.

[bemildred]

1. You'd have to have been there.

An over-rated work, very much of its place and time.

Salinger was doing the touchy recluse artist thing, didn't write very much, and he got the fifties-young-white-person what-we-would-call-yuppie angst just right for the times. There were a lot of smart-rebellious-well-off-white-kid-in-private-school novels, bildungsromans, back then, the young and sensitive were worshipped.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Yes, it's basically about a 1950s teenager questioning the whole

"Mad Men" atmosphere of his times. Today's teens (even the teens of the late 1960s, when I was a teen) have different issues. It's like "A Separate Peace," another pointless novel about 1950s teens that somehow got enshrined in the high school curriculum in the 1960s when the teachers were of the 1950s generation.