Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 2:43 pm
http://www.goodmagazine.com/section....the_rye
Didn't we talk about this when we decided that people who whine about growing up in the suburbs are whiney bitches?
If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age tale must go through “all that Holden Caulfield crap.” In the 19th century, a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person. That remains more or less true, but now the equation for the modern bildungsroman is more like, as a friend puts it: “Horny plus bored minus transportation divided by the whole of one’s interior life, multiplied by an inverse ratio of miles to a city or a place where there is anything at all to do.”
Didn't we talk about this when we decided that people who whine about growing up in the suburbs are whiney bitches?