The Catcher in The Rye

Is "The Catcher in the Rye" a perfect novel? Here are some famous authors opinions on it and Salinger

Samuel Beckett: “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”

Vladimir Nabokov: "Salinger, J. D. By far one of the finest artists in recent years."

William Faulkner: “Let me repeat. I have not read all the work of this present generation of writing. I have not had time yet. So I must speak only of the ones I do know. I am thinking now of what I rate the best one, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because this one expresses so completely what I have tried to say. A youth, father to what will—must—someday be a man, more intelligent than some and more sensitive than most, who—he would not even have called it by instinct because he did not know he possessed it because God perhaps had put it there, loved man and wished to be a part of mankind, humanity, who tried to join the human race and failed. To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. There was nothing for him to do save buzz, frantic and inviolate, inside the glass wall of his tumbler, until he either gave up or was himself, by himself, by his own frantic buzzing, destroyed.”"

Ernest Hemingway: "Hemingway, on the other hand, is happy to name Salinger one of his three favorite contemporary authors; when he dies, a copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” is found in his library. "

Phillip Roth: The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture.” Roth also has "The Cather in the Rye" listed as one of his 15 favorite novels.

As for me I think it's the greatest thing ever written, nothing written before or after it has come close to the characterization, narration, prose style, and emotional resonance and tenderness of this book. I'm always sobbing whenever I read the final two chapters.

Solid fallacy thread. Good book tho

No, I haven't read it but it's shit

A true piece of postmodern literature and the rise of interventionist existentialism. Literally guided the USA national culture into becoming the world police.

"interventionist existentialism"? can you expand?

The part where he rapes his sister was just too uch for me. Didnt even finish

Holden was obsessed with the injustice and suffering of this world. So he became the catcher in the rye who would save children from falling off the edge of a cliff. Though, these children were all people incapable of protecting themselves, from our mortal coils. People incapable of reazligin the truth of reality and crime, and governments, and states. So he, and he alone, as a metaphor for the USA and states, would intervene and act on their behalf whether they wanted it or not. Because it was the right thing to do. Its what he found meaning in, intervening in people's lives so he could help them regardless of their wishes because they didn't know.

OP here. I have two quotes from Murakami to add.

Haruki Murakami: "I was constantly astonished by how good it all was. I was just impressed, you know, and kept thinking “so it was this great all along”. I’m a novelist too, but I couldn’t write a work like this. Definitely not."

"Nevertheless, [...] Catcher did remain inexplicably entrenched my heart. Throughout my life, Catcher was always inside me. That makes it makes it a pretty mysterious novel, doesn’t it? It isn’t easily forgotten. It just persistently kept building up in my peripheral vision."

Nabokov was an utter hack in his literary criticism.
He deserves respect for Lolita, but the stuff he wrote on Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann is just unforgivable.
*spits*

It's a fairy story, not an allegory.