Other critics hedged their bets. An unsigned review in the July 15, 1951, Booklist found the work “imaginative” but warned of “coarse language.” Writing for the Library Journal (July 1951), Harold L. Roth “highly recommended” the novel but warned that it “may be a shock to many parents” and should be thought of as strictly adult reading. The reviewer for the Nation (September 1, 1951) liked parts of the story but generally thought it was “predictable and boring.” Anne L. Goodman of the New Republic (July 16, 1951) rated the final (carrousel) scene “as good as anything that Salinger has written” but concluded that “the book as a whole is disappointing”; there was just too much of Holden in the book for her. In the August 1951 Atlantic Monthly, Harvey Breit considered the work as a “summer novel” and found it to be a “near miss” in effectiveness. He was, however, one of the first to compare The Catcher in the Rye to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, an insight whose value has held up over time. In the July 15, 1951, New York Times, James Stern chose an approach that, unfortunately, was popular nationwide. Attempting to review the novel in the voice of its narrator, he offered such strained turns as, “This Salinger, he’s a short-story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book though, it’s too long. Gets kind of monotonous.”
Still others condemned the novel. The Christian Science Monitor (July 19, 1951) complained of the “wholly repellent” vulgarity and “sly perversion” of the piece, concluding that no one who truly loved children could have written such a work. In another widely quoted assessment, Catholic World (November 1951) complained about the “excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language” and suggested that “some of the events stretch probability,” calling Holden “monotonous and phony.”
