Is the Wimpy Kid the Holden Caulfield of our generation? The Atlantic explores this question.
From the piece...
The kids, I’m sorry to report, are getting sharper all the time. Did you know that Holden Caulfield is now in middle school? That’s right: no longer cadging drinks or wrestling with pimps in fleapit Manhattan hotel rooms, the arch-diagnostician of adult bullshit is currently trick-or-treating and going out for ice cream with his mother. His name isn’t Holden anymore—it’s Greg. But his mood, that current of fretful optimism alternating with a cavernous disenchantment, is more or less unchanged: “I don’t know if this makes me a bad person or whatever, but it’s hard for me to get interested in other people’s vacations.” Or: “I’ll be famous one day, but for now I’m stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons.”
Greg Heffley, underdeveloped narrator of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney’s mega-selling “novel in cartoons,” wears a nearly permanent frown. At least, it would be a frown, if he had eyebrows: Kinney draws his characters like emoticons, with dots for eyes, U-shaped noses, and downturned-bracket mouths. (Rodrick, Greg’s incipiently delinquent heavy-metal older brother, flexes a set of fierce and hyphen-like eyebrows.) The book opens with a twang of Salingerean surliness: “This [the diary] was MOM’s idea,” declares Greg. “But if she thinks I’m going to write down my ‘feelings’ in here or whatever, she’s crazy. So just don’t expect me to be all ‘Dear Diary’ this and ‘Dear Diary’ that.”
And all that kind of crap, we hear the original Holden adding.
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