If you liked The Catcher in the Rye ...
Read Franny and Zooey . Catcher is about a lot of things, but one is phoniness. Holden thinks everything and everyone is phony. Gladhanding headmasters, pseudo-intellectuals, preachers with “holy Joe” voices – all phonies. No question, Holden’s hypercritical mindset is part of a complex interwoven set of defense mechanisms designed to keep him from acknowledging his own emotional pain, but even with the unreliable nature of his narration, I have always thought that most of the things he labels phony really are phony. Phoniness, for Holden, involves inauthenticity. Fakeness. When he talks about institutions being phony, he is calling out the wide distance between how an institution projects itself and how it really is – usually done through PR, advertising, and other carefully crafted outward displays. Holden, for instance, says that his school, Pencey Prep, "advertise[s] in about a thousand magazines,