User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.The blinking cursor that preceded this review, the place-holder of possibility before the big bang of creation, speaks volumes when taken in relation to J.D. Salinger’s exquisite
Franny and Zooey. In a novel about identity, about forging who we are from a blank slate in the void of society and humanity, we are constantly called to the floor and reminded how often we impose our ego, or wishes, our desires, and become a caricature of ourselves hoping that by creating a façade-self, our true self will eventually follow the leader and fill the mold we’ve forged for the world to see. We constantly try to pigeonhole the world on our own terms, wrongly imposing our own perspective and missing out in the beauty that flowers when we embrace anything as itself without the confines of our implied impressions. This creates a highly tuned, self-conscious atmosphere that makes it difficult to begin writing about without feeling like I, myself, am imposing my undeserved and unqualified ego by casting these words into the world. That damned blinking cursor amidst a field of white on my screen, returning again and again after each quickly deleted early attempts, made me feel very much like Franny herself, sick of realizing that every action is an attempt at being noticed.
I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.
Can I write without being a disgusting egomaniac, without imposing myself on everyone? My own fears and excuses for writers block aside, Salinger perfectly focuses upon the inner crises of anyone that has truly looked themselves in the mirror and assessed both the world around them and their place in it. Through a simplistic, character driven account of a family thwarted by their own crippling self-awareness, Salinger crafts a flawless tale of identity and family that takes up right where he left off with Holden Caulfield—where we learn not to judge those around us, but to understand and accept one another on their own terms in order to live and love.
I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life.This novel was graciously bequeathed to me at the exact moment it was needed most. With a ravenous Midwest winter providing the bleak setting to funerals and my own divorce, the existential crisis and subsequent breakdown of Franny Glass was the pure emotional catharsis that kept me positive and afloat across life’s tumultuous sea¹.
Franny and Zooey is virtually Zen in novel format, and for reasons far surpassing the religious allusions that decorate the novel (as well as entice readers into other spiritually gratifying books such as The Upanishads). There is something eminently soothing about this Salinger tale of family, something that really struck me in the deep regions of my heart and soul, and prodded certain defining aspects of my childhood that I tend to keep from conversation. Salinger’s prose come across so natural and heartfelt as if he truly were Buddy himself writing the second half, and reads like a naturally talented author writing at the pinnacle of his craft. The use of italics, for example, a technique exercised right up to the borderlines of overuse, is one of the many tactics Salinger applies² to his literary canvas to conceive life out of a nearly plot-less, introspective narrative and issuing within it a warm glow to resonate deep within the reader, lifting their spirits and calming their minds. It feels like the point of conception for Wes Anderson’s entire career (and meant as the highest of compliments to both Anderson and Salinger), and much of the style and feel of the book touched many of the same literary emotions that stored DFW’s
Infinite Jest forever in my heart.
Presented as two separate, yet eternally bound stories, Salinger toys with the way we craft our identity in our formative years. The first story, concerning a dinner between Franny and her egotistical and stuffy collegiate cliché of a boyfriend, Lane Coutell, presents Franny functioning as an independent individual in the world, a singular facet of humanity defined as Franny. There is no mention of her family or her past, only details pertaining directly to her as the individual at hand. However, the second story is not one of independent identity, but instead has each character represented as an individual
in relation to each other—as a product of a family. Franny’s obsession with the book, The Way of a Pilgrim and the Pilgrim Continues His Way, which is initially presented—direct from the mouth of Franny in an attempt to portray herself as an independent identity discovering things on her own and forging beliefs untarnished by the influence of others—as a book she took from her college library, is revealed in the latter story to be a book held in high regard by the eldest Glass children and borrowed by Franny from their stagnant bedroom. We cannot escape our past, our family, our choices, or ourselves, and any identity we attempt to form can only become a crumbling façade without this depth of acceptance and awareness. We are only who we are in relation to those around us, and without accepting both ourselves, and the world around us, can we become fully actualized identities.
The Catcher in the Rye a book as essential to any high school literary education as vegetables to any balanced diet, gave us Holden Caulfield who put a microscope to society and exposed the bacteria of ‘phoniness’ that is inherent in everyone around him. Franny prescribes to this disenchanting reality as well, abandoning her laundry list of pleasures upon seeing them as merely a method of stoking her own ego. She views her every possible move as just another solution towards conformity and every action as attention seeking.
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
Compare this expression existential angst to the depictions of her boyfriend. Lane's true nature is best examined in his juxtaposition to Franny, revealed through Salinger’s ominous narration to be one constantly seeking an expression or posture to best capture the exact image of himself that he would ideally envision the world to read from him.
Lane sat up a bit in his chair and adjusted his expression from that of all-round apprehension and discontent to that of a man whose date has merely gone to the john, leaving him, as dates do, with nothing to do in the meantime but smoke and look bored, perfectly attractively bored.
To Lane, Franny is just an extension of his costume of attractive social veneer, a girl attractive and intelligent enough to be seen with in order for him to be viewed in high regard by his contemporaries. It is the Lanes and all the ‘section men’, as Franny terms them, who are more concerned with the appearance of being a genius than actually being a genius.
I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.Where Caulfield left us in a feeling of superiority, yet devastating darkness, for recognizing the fakers and phonies around us, Zooey Glass, full of unremitting charm, tosses a spiritual life raft and allows us to recognize the beauty in the world around us. ‘
In the first place,’ he lovingly scolds his sister, Franny, ‘
you’re way off when you start railing atthings
and people instead of at yourself.’ We are all a part of this world, nobody is truly
special and above worldly mistakes and foibles, and we are all eternally caught in a struggle of identity whether we know it or not. Like the best of David Foster Wallace, this is a story about those with the mental and emotional acuity to recognize or fear that their actions and beliefs conform to the phoniness of the world regardless of how hard they try to shake it; the Glass family is a family of practically card-carrying MENSA members with an intellect that is not only a transcendental gift but also a hellishly weighty burden. Life is a game we all must unwillingly participate in, at least to the extent that we remain alive and in the game, and we should not chastise the world and hold ourselves in too high of regard unless we really take a look at our own motives. He exposes Franny’s decision to follow the Pilgrim’s method of finding transcendence through relentless prayer to be just another expression of the ego she finds so distasteful in others, enacting a self-righteous holier-than-thou attitudes without actually understanding the mask she has chosen to wear. Drawing upon the lessons learned from his elder brothers, Buddy and Seymour, Zooey challenges Franny to look beyond what she considers the ego—’
half the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren’t using their true egos…the thing you think is his ego, isn’t his ego at all but some other, much dirtier, much less basic
faculty’—and to recognize the true beauty of everyone around her. Inspired by the advice of his eldest brother, Seymour (whose tragic suicide is chronicled in a short story I’d proclaim as perfect,
A Perfect Day for Bananafish from Salinger’s Nine Stories), that even though the audience can’t see them, to shine his shoes ‘
for the Fat Lady’, Zooey proclaims, like a hip, 1950’s New York bodhisattva
Are you listening to me?There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Syemour’s Fat Lady
…It’s Christ Himself.’ Somehow, as if by pure magic, Salinger manages to highlight spirituality without the reader feeling like he is preaching or backhanding them with Christianity (in fact, through the frequent references to many of the world’s religion that wonderfully adorn the novel, the message feels entirely universal despite any religious, or even non-religious, beliefs the reader brings to the table), but simply professes a triumphant message of universal love that is sure to infiltrate each and every heart. To fully exist, one must accept the world for what it is, love both the blessings and blemishes, and accept objects, ideas and people on those being's own terms, as a thing-in-itself, instead of an imposed belief in what we think they should be. We cannot infringe our ego upon the things beyond our grasp, but merely fully love them for them.
We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.
Essentially, this is a novel about arguments. How else can we properly form an identity without our own internal arguments between our disparate ideas and ideals? Religious, societal, whatever, this is a book of great minds coming together to hash out their beliefs in an effort to dig up some sort of truth that you can pocket and carry with you into the harsh weathers of reality. The center piece of the book, the ever-logical and too-witty-for-his-own-good Zooey engaged in a shouting match with his mother, a woman with such wholesome and good-natured worldly wisdom that appears as simplicity to an untrained eye, is wholly unforgettable and made of the stuff that reminds you why you so love reading books. And what better way to craft a novel full of arguments that to focus it upon a family, the perfect stage for arguments that allow oneself to shed any social armor and nakedly swing their sword of beliefs and opinions? Upon entering into the second story of the novel,
Franny and Zooey is more of less contained within the confines of the family circle, further highlighting Franny’s breakdown³ as the collapse of a socially reinforced personality mask to reduce her to her basic and pure elements as a the youngest member of the Glass family. Though Zooey has plans to meet with his television world contacts, he doesn’t leave the house until he can set things right; the family must be set right before the outside world can be accounted for. There seems to be a belief that the family is a functioning being that outweighs that of the individual, and reinforces the family vs. the outside world ideal that was idolized in the 1950’s television programs like
Leave it to Beaver or even
Ozzie and Harriet. Family values must hold strong against a world that will rio them apart with its frightening winds. Salinger, who was fully fascinated with his Glass family creation, having a file cabinet full of notes about the family and diving deep within their mechanics for much of his fiction, creates his ideal family values that must cope with worldly problems, such as Seymour’s war experience and fatal struggle with PTSD, Buddy and Zooey’s ongoing struggle with a entertainment world more entrenched in simple pleasures and ratings than actual intellectual merit, or even Franny’s crisis with the ‘
white-shoe college boys’ inflicting their stylized genius on those around them. The Glass house is a house ‘
full of ghosts’ and the family must accept themselves as a product of this gene pool, as a product of the teachings bestowed upon them by their own blood, as a functioning member in not only the family but the world at large, taking all this into a catalyst for their own identity. Interestingly enough, it would seem that
Franny and Zooey is more a book about Buddy and Seymour and their legacy than the title characters themselves. It is through the youngest two Glass members that we understand the eldest two. This technique of creating a penumbra effect of understanding to actualize Buddy and Seymour in the minds and hearts of the reader is fully in keeping with the idea that we can only form our identity
in relation to all those around us. Just as we must accept the world around us on its own terms, we must accept ourselves on our own and not based on how others will view us.
An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.I am reminded of a favorite quote of mine that comes from the cathartically cantankerous with of Charles Bukowski:
We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
We cannot spend our time criticizing others, overanalyzing ever flaw and absurdity that presents itself in each face we encounter. Because what is gained from this that has any merit to our finite existence? We are all bumbling about trying to find our way in a world whose meaning must inherently escape us (and what point would it serve anyhow if we understood life and could just simply follow the dotted line towards a perfect life?). This is a novel of staggering importance and cathartic power that far surpasses even the frequently touted The Catcher in the Rye. Drawing a Zen-like potency from the positive messages found in many of the world’s religion and spiritually influential members, Salinger teaches us a valuable lesson about acceptance and identity while simultaneously preforming the luminous task of taking a near static story and plunging the reader so deep into the souls of its characters to light the literary sky with pure vitality and emotional well-being that they feel as if it were they that suffered both the existential collapse and recovery upon the Glass’ living room couch. Allow Franny to have your breakdown for you, and for Zooey to resurrect you from the calamity. Allow Salinger to charm you with his perfectly crafted sentences and sage-like wisdom. Read
Franny and Zooey and love the life you live and the world around you.
5/5¹ This is not, however, the ideal book to read when quitting smoking. Rest assured, I persevered. But really, practically one cigarette or cigar is lit per page. ‘
The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn’t have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground.’
² Another subtle, yet incredible narrative flourish is Zooey's constant use of 'buddy' as a term of endearment to his sister. This was a nod to Jay Gatsby frequently calling others 'old sport' in The Great Gatsby.
³ In the margins of my book, I tussled with the idea that Franny’s behavior would be clinically explained as a manic episode, but embraced by a literary bent as an existential conundrum. This further led to an idea that Lane, who viewed Franny’s collapse from a cold, callus position of one more concerned about having to miss the football game and having to excuse his girlfriends erratic behavior, as choosing to see the world from a scientific perspective that he thought should be devoid of emotional rationalization to avoid looking foolish, whereas Franny fully embraces emotion as a window into the soul and chooses a spiritual outlook to organize the hustle and bustle of the world in her mind.
The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.
Rating: really liked it
I am a huge JD Salinger fan, and I'm one of those people who's read "Catcher in the Rye" like 200 times, several times a year since I was about twelve. I buy into every cliche said about it: it changed my life, it made me want to write, it validated my own teen angst, Salinger captures teen-speak amazingly well, Holden Caulfield is vulnerable and wise, a kid-hero, etc. I have such an emotional attachment to the book that I find it hard to tolerate much criticism of it. Case in point: I recently came across an article written by Jonathan Yardley in 2004 for the Washington Post entitled "J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly". One of the best quotes from the piece:
"Rereading 'The Catcher in the Rye' after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil."
Ouch. Double ouch because I had to look up "jejune".
This article prompted me to delve deeper into the Salinger canon, and I resurfaced holding "Franny & Zooey". Yardley may have prompted me to question my devotion, but this book cemented what I already knew: JD Salinger is a wonderful writer and his characters are the written equivalent of crack. You just can't get enough.
"Franny & Zooey" is one of several books/short stories written about the Glass family. There are seven Glass kids, all of whom were, at various points, panelists on a radio quiz show with the best name ever: "It's A Wise Child".
"Franny & Zooey" focuses on the two youngest siblings, hence the title, who are both in the midst of emotional and existential breakdowns. Franny, away at college in Boston, has read a book called "The Way of the Pilgrim, which has instilled in her an obsession with the concept of "praying without ceasing". Suddenly, everything around her is meaningless, she can't study or eat or sleep, and returns to New York to recouperate. Zooey is a sometimes-working actor, determined to help his sister.
The book touches on familiar Salinger-esque themes, including relgious devotion/fanaticism, kids vs. adults, a potentially meaningless world, etc. This book explores religion in an engaging, relatable way. Franny's qustions are universal and Zooey's answers are valid.
Authorities on the Glass Family will appreciate the insight into the unit, particularly into eldest brothers Seymour (who at that point has already committed suicide) and Buddy, who narrates the story. Zooey blames them for using himself and Franny as philosphical guinea pigs, pumping them full from the time they were toddlers with vast and varied dogma simply to see what would stick.
All of that said, I think the most important thing about this book, and all of Salinger's books, is its pure, joyful readability. "Franney & Zooey" contains passages that are absolutely HILARIOUS, specifically the extensive conversation between Zooey and his nagging mother, Bessie, that takes place in the bathroom. I was laughing out loud throughout.
He's been called the voice of several generations, but Salinger's ability to maintain belly-laugh-worthy humor while touching on such dark themes might be the most notable (and most underappreciated) thing about him.
Rating: really liked it
“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
Franny and Zooey ~~ J.D. Salinger
This was my first exposure to Salinger. I’ve made attempts in the past to read
Catcher in the Rye, but I was never able to connect with it. My friend
Spenky raved about Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” so I decided this would be my introduction to Salinger. To say I was enthralled with Salinger’s writing would be an understatement.
My first thought upon reading the final page was “finally, I finished this book.” It's usually not a good thing when you're relieved once you finish a book but I feel that it's different with Salinger’s book. This was a journey, for me and the characters, in which I and they work through problems. Of course you're relieved when you find the answers at the end. And, thankfully, Salinger does give answers.
Rather than bore you with my take on “Franny and Zooey” here's a description of the book by Salinger himself.
“FRANNY came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed, in 1957 by ZOOEY. Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I'm doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambiguous one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I'm very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I've been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.” 
These are two short stories but so closely related, 'Zooey' (a novella) starts where 'Franny' (a short story) ends, that it is probably better for both stories to be read together. Zooey Glass and Franny Glass are brother and sister and the two youngest of seven children. All of them have been on a quiz radio show 'A Wise Child' which seems to have led to all of them having difficulty in dealing with other people. 'Franny' centers on her going to meet her boyfriend, Lane, for the weekend which turns into a disaster on the first day because she seems to be out of sorts. 'Zooey' then offers an explanation of this from the brother's perspective as she comes home to be consumed in her problems. We get an insight into their history and an explanation and solution for Franny's problem
Perhaps 'Franny' was my favorite of the two, perhaps; perhaps 'Zooey' is the better of the two, perhaps. I found myself often agreeing with Zooey. Salenger’s observations of college students and their attitudes (how I miss those days) are funny and also quite true. He exposes the phony self-congratulatory and self-importance that is even more present now than when he wrote these works. Yes, Salinger is terribly judgmental, or at least, his characters are.
It’s that realization that no matter who you are, you are a very small piece in a much larger whole, and the need to accept that that’s crushing Franny. She wants to partake in the world without feeling let down with its banality. It seems the challenge Salinger is putting out there for Franny to face is how to love the world for what it is without condescending to it. It’s a sentiment felt at one time or another by everyone with any self-awareness.
Rating: really liked it
If you liked Catcher in the Rye more than your average novel, then you probably have considered reading Franny and Zooey. It's one of very few books that J.D. Salinger wrote because he kind of turned into a weird old recluse. I was really excited about reading this. I expected big things. Needless to say, I was very disappointed.
Problem number one: Zooey, who is essentially the "protagonist" (or one of two main characters) is pretty much identical to the main character from Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield. And so is every other guy character in Franny and Zooey. They all talk and act the same. It's all "Jesus Christ, goddam" and you can't tell them apart.
Problem number two: the plot. If you thought Catcher in the Rye was short on plot, check out this book. NOTHING happens. I mean it. Nothing. The first quarter of the book is just Franny sitting in a restaurant talking to her boyfriend. The remaining three fourths is Zooey sitting in the bathtub talking to his mom, then getting dressed and talking to his sister in the living room. That's it. They don't do anything. They don't go anywhere. The entire book is just characters talking to each other. And it's boring, pointless dialogue, too. It'd be one thing if they were interesting characters but they're not. And all they do is smoke. Every one of them. They chain smoke like it's the only thing Salinger could think of to put into his novel that wasn't in quotation marks.
Hmm, what can Zooey do when he's not talking...I've got it! He can smoke a cigar! Brilliant!
More like frustrating. That makes two books in a row that I've read and been disappointed with.
Rating: really liked it
I loved this book so much I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself for several hours after reading it.
https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.co...
Logically, it seems that maybe shorter books would be harder to love. You spend less time with the characters, the narrative complexity must be limited, you live in the world for a minimal amount of time.
But for the past few years, I’ve found that I’m more likely to adore short books. Maybe it has something to do with the incomprehensible length of so many young adult fantasy books I’ve read, which have no need or right to stretch so far past the four hundred page mark.
Or maybe I’m endlessly impressed by the power of some authors to touch me with the strength of their voices, their prose, their characters, their stories, in less than three hundred pages.
I had fallen in love with this book, for example, within a few dozen pages.
Salinger’s writing is glorious, Franny and Zooey and the Glass family leap off the page, I could spend unlimited volumes sprawled in the overcrowded living room of their glamorous unusual apartment. The ending hits like a physical strike. I was reading of both feelings I’d always had and never put into words and emotions I had never imagined.
I need a modern day Frankenstein - someone to wake Salinger up and tell him I need enough of the Glass family’s words to spend the rest of my life with.
I don’t care about the ethics.
Bottom line: Literally no one needs me to tell them this book is amazing, but it is and I’m saying it anyway.
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pre-reviewthis book feels like it was made for me in a lab.
review to come / 5 stars
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currently-reading updates30 pages in and i am already absolutely in love with franny
Rating: really liked it
(Book 445 from 1001 books) - Franny And Zooey, J.D. SalingerFranny and Zooey is a book by American author J. D. Salinger which comprises his short story "Franny" and novella Zooey. The two works were published together as a book in 1961, having originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957 respectively. The book focuses on siblings Franny and Zooey, the two youngest members of the Glass family, which was a frequent focus of Salinger's writings.
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «فرانی و زویی»؛ «فرنی و زویی»؛ «فرنی و زویی همراه با شرح اسامی مکانها و حوادث و یادداشت...»؛ نویسنده: جی.دی سالینجر؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه اکتبر سال2001میلادی
عنوان: فرانی و زویی؛ نویسنده: جی.دی سالینجر؛ مترجم: میلاد زکریا؛ تهران، نشر مرکز، سال1380؛ در185ص؛ شابک9789643055875؛ چاپ ششم سال1386؛ چاپ هفتم سال1387؛ چتپ یازدهم سال1392؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م
عنوان: فرنی و زویی؛ نویسنده: جی.دی سالینجر؛ مترجم: امید نیک فرجام؛ تهران، نیلا، سال1381؛ در157ص؛ چاپ دوم سال1383؛ چاپ سوم سال1385؛ چاپ پنجم سال1392؛ شابک9789646900400؛
عنوان: فرنی و زویی همراه با شرح اسامی مکانها و حوادث و یادداشت...؛ نویسنده: جی.دی سالینجر؛ مترجم: علی شیعه علی؛ زهرا میرباقری؛ تهران، سبزان، سال1390؛ چاپ دوم سال1392؛ در223ص؛ شابک9786001170638؛
کتاب دارای دو داستان کوتاه با عنوانهای: «فرانی» و «زویی» است؛ داستان نخست، شرح دیدار پایان هفتهٔ ی «فرانی گلس»، کوچکترین عضو خانواده ی «گلس»، با دوست پسرش، «لین کاتل» است؛ «فرانی» ادبیات میخواند، و همانند سایر فرزندان خانوادهٔ «گلس» علاقهٔ ویژه ای به عرفان شرقی دارد؛ «فرانی» در پی خوانش یک کتاب عرفانی، دچار بحرانی روحی و عرفانی شده است
داستان دوم، زمانی را به تصویر میکشد، که «فرانی»، از دانشگاه به خانه برگشته، و اعضای خانواده اش، هر یک به شیوه ی خود، برای بهبودی «فرانی» تلاش میکنند؛ برادرش «زویی»، که بازیگری بیست و پنج ساله است، در این داستان نقش پررنگ و موثری دارد؛ سایر اعضای خانواده ی او نیز، در این داستان تا حدودی معرفی و شناخته میشوند؛ «سیمور»، بزرگترین پسر خانواده، که به نوعی مرشد و قدیس آنها به شمار میآید، خودکشی کرده است؛ «بادی»، پسر دوم است که پس از «سیمور»، نقشی حیاتی در زندگی فرزندان کوچکتر ایفا میکند؛ او در حالتی رهبانی و در گوشه ای پرت، زندگی و در یک مدرسه ی عالی دخترانه، تدریس میکند؛ پس از ایشان هم یک دختر، و دوقلوهای پسری قرار دارند، که به نسبت سایرین نقش کمرنگتری در داستان دارند؛ خانوادهٔ «گلس» در دیگر داستانهای «سالینجر» نیز حضور دارند؛ گرچه ایشان به دنبال ارائه ی تصویر کامل از این خانواده نیستند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 11/10/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 04/11/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Rating: really liked it
I read this marvellous book in the winter of 1973-74 and it marked for me a moment at which my adult intelligence was crystallized. The product was a plodding, alienated way of thinking that marked me with a modern label: a keenly sensitive existentialist.
Oh, not so sensitive as I’ve become, many, many books of life stories later.
I was still a chrysalis that hadn’t yet broken open into the world’s stark terror. Like Franny. A child of Pax Americana. Alone and isolated and struggling to come to terms with the vast echoes of an uncaring world.
Echoes only - for I was at that early stage of a very conditioned adaptation to that world: the stage of the sudden irruption of a lately-teenaged self into organized lonely chaos. Ah, the days of youth. Days when I could still romanticize my struggle in Whitmanesque language!
At night, after work at my first fulltime job after uni, I sat before my little red plastic Sony B&W TV, and watched pseudo-existential mush like Kojak - or, in better taste - the stark early films of Ingmar Bergman on the weekends.
But here’s the thing. It took me a lifetime of anxiety before I would be finally able to turf the Ego-Ring of Self along with Frodo - at his last stop: Mount Doom.
The nightmare of Mount Doom had appeared irrevocably to Salinger’s Seymours and Zooeys, as it started to do to me at twenty, though in a dreaming state. Luckily, for I was never as bright as the Glass wiz-kids.
My cauchemars of Mount Doom would always be dispelled into the convenient mists provided by my mood stabilizers.
I wake to sleep,
And take my waking slow.
Is it any wonder Theodore Roethke was such a guiding light to me back then? But Roethke never turfed his Ring.
Through a lifetime of prayer and meditation, I was able, finally to say my good-byes to all its black magic.
As Eliot reminded me so often, “humility is endless.”
But Franny and her too-bright siblings are justifiably proud.
For the world’s taste, if not for God’s.
But what business does God have in a jarringly alienated Salinger Universe?
None whatsoever.
So they say.
Rating: really liked it
This is great; it really is. In many ways it’s the anti Cornwell-Patterson-Grisham-King-Coben-Brown.
Franny and Zooey isn’t fast paced or plot driven; it isn’t thrilling (in the traditional sense), and its concepts aren’t surfaced-based or easy to come by (or even embraced by the mainstream populace), but Salinger didn’t write for these people; he wrote for himself and if you identified with what he wrote, good for you -- if not, so be it. Even so, it’s not flourishy or fancy; there’s nothing pretentious about it. There is a general disdain for snobbery running through its veins.
“You raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam 'unskilled laughter' coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right -- God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and
on his own terms, not anyone else's.”
Franny and Zooey would be have been prescient if it were written
today. Salinger’s kooky, wacky sense of humor; his accuracy with individualized thought; his passion for non-conformity and for the
individual, are all unmatched, even today. In retrospect of all we know and can (now) see of his time period, Salinger's poking and mocking of (then current) society, make
Franny and Zooey seem like it was written (brilliantly) today.
Maybe it's because this book has to do with an older brother and younger sister (I’m an older brother), or maybe it's because I know how much some of my friends love this novel, but I felt rushes of something like nostalgia during my reading; some kind of sentimentality or appreciation for my friends that love this. (If you think you can’t get sentimental over a Salinger novel, you’re obviously not part of the group that loves him -- you can’t be). And while I don’t love Salinger the way some of my friends do*, I sure as fuck
appreciate him, and I sure as fuck had an absolute blast reading
Franny and Zooey-- my new favorite Salinger novel.
*Whether he’s one of your favorite authors or not, if you’re of the breed that can indentify with Salinger's thinking -- and can maybe even see some similarities between you and some of his characters -- you feel a love for this man.
Rating: really liked it
So, this semester I am teaching a course on postwar American novels. I am basically a former high school English teacher who became an English educator (preparing people to become English teachers themselves), and only relatively recently have been asked to teach “straight” lit courses at my university as I usually have taught methods (of teaching) classes (though also YA and Graphic Novels) in the past quarter century. I just turned 61, and have not read many of these novels for this course for literally decades, many of them since I was in my early twenties, when they were truly identity-forming for me as reader, teacher (less so this because I have almost taught none of them in all my nearly forty years of teaching), and person, for sure. I see them now as Great Books, but not quite in the classical canon sense, because when I think of the Canon I think of Shakespeare and Milton and not Kerouac and Heller. Prior to teaching this course I thought of the period (1945-1980) as basically the Beats (fifties, drugs and self) and Hippies (sixties and early seventies, drugs and social causes) and Beyond (some postmodern stuff, less chemical and more fictional experimentation), basically.
When I first began choosing the books for this course I went to Goodreads lists and picked out maybe 75 American novels I thought were “important” for one reason or the other in the years 1945-1980. I knew we could only read 12-14 of them, and I knew some of them might be pretty long, so I starred ones on my list that I really wanted to re-read, books I had loved, and came up with maybe 18-20. My thinking at this point was that the course would be kind of about ME, a kind of Re-reading My Self course, reading as autobiography, as in: What do I recall these books meant to me then, how did I understand them, and how do I read them differently now? Who do I think I was then, who do I think I am now, and how did/do these books figure in the process? Shoshana Felman wrote a book called What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference? which among other things makes the point that with some books, they are essentially autobiographical, that we read ourselves in and through them so much that we see them as telling our own stories. In her book she illustrates this by telling stories about some of her favorite books. I like that. Reading a book through your life, in part, with some books, at least. And for the process I even have some old copies of texts with underlined passages and margin commentary from the old days! Cool, right?
Most college courses are probably usually like that in some ways, in that they are all about the teacher’s project or research or obsessions, so it wouldn’t be weird for students to experience a class like that (though most college English classes have nothing to do with reader response or subjective readings of texts, they are all about close readings or some postmodern theoretical frame for the reading), but I have not usually done things this way, thinking it as kind of narcissistic, so I changed my mind and did what I often do, I invited the registered students to help me choose the books. About half of the students enthusiastically participated; I went with their enthusiastic choices of certain books even if they were not on my primo list, though I did keep a couple from my own original list. I also ended up with a couple on the final list I had never read, which is cool. Oh, the list? Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Nabokov’s Lolita, Kerouac’s On the Road, Plath’s The Bell Jar, Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Heller’s Catch 22, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow {which was our last book, so we only began reading it, maybe half], Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Mailer’s Executioner’s Song [which we did not end up reading]. Lots of white men, you say? Guilty as charged, but then a lot of male and female students helped me! What follows is the first book we read in this course.
Postwar Novel Story #1: Franny and Zooey is usually the book you read after you join the 60? 90? million people who have read Catcher in the Rye. If you hate Holden, this will end your Salinger journey, but for those of us who felt/feel he speaks for us in naming all the phoniness in the world, we next read the somewhat kinder, gentler Franny and Zooey, and especially fall in love with Franny, the female Holden, a fragile, driven-to-nervous-breakdown early twenties kid, more like Holden than Zooey, Franny's somewhat harsher but also more insightful older brother. In fact (and this is a Salingerism to say things like “in fact” and interjections like this) you see Holden (and probably Salinger himself?) in all the Glass family (suicidal Seymour; Buddy, the writer/recluse who retreats to the New Hampshire woods; 20 something drop-out, “nervous breakdown” actress Franny, and commercially successful but self-and other-loathing 25 year old Zooey).
No plot summary will I write, but the two separate but related stories that comprise this collection are the separately published (in The New Yorker, 1955) “Franny” which is about a meeting with her current hilariously phony boyfriend Lane in The City, focusing on Franny in spiritual/psychological crisis, and “Zooey,” published two years later, (also in The New Yorker) focusing on the family’s attempts at intervention into Franny’s crisis, while also addressing Zooey’s very related crisis. Both are kinda early twenties stuck, wondering how to live their lives with Purpose and Meaning, as I was then. There’s very little plot to tell even if were to try, actually; most of both stories are a series of extended dialogues, broken up mainly by a lot of chain smoking, but the dialogues are amazing, sometimes exasperating in that the Glass family is pretty messed up, and self-absorbed, but also sometimes quite moving in that their struggles are spiritual, in response to a messed-up world, where the Glass kids find they are lost and struggling to find themselves in what Salinger and they saw as “pure” versions of spiritual truth such as Buddhist and Hindu notions of self-lessness (ideas Salinger was steeped in since the late forties until he died), which Franny finds imbedded in two books on “Christ-consciousness,” books about a pilgrim learning “the Jesus Prayer” (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”),which are also books about what it means to pray without ceasing, to become prayer/Christ/Buddha/Dharma/Satori, and so on. Basically the concern is how to live a life of integrity, if not quite ethical commitment. Though it’s still more about self (and the goal of artistic perfection Salinger wanted for himself, free of Fame and Media and Buzz) than ethical commitment, though, really. It’s what you should do for yourself. Individualism, one siren song of the fifties after all that patriotism and the war. But also spirituality, after a horrific world war. Back to life as usual? Salinger hopes not.
When I first read this book I had “borrowed” (and still have) it from the bedroom Marthena Bosch had vacated in what became my sister Shirley’s house in Holland, MI. Marthena was maybe fifteen years older than me, and had broken from the Dutch Reformed faith I was basically also raised in. She had books on her shelf like an edited collection of The Beats, On the Road, all of Salinger, Hesse, and books on Zen Buddhism. I consumed these books in the late sixties, in my late teens, and probably read Franny after Catcher in my junior or senior year in high school. What political and spiritual turmoil the late sixties were for me, starting with books about race (from the sixties race riots, Black Like Me, Nigger by Dick Gregory, Dr. King’s works, Malcolm X); the women’s movement (I actually read Marthena’s copy of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvior at 16 to find out something about feminism, all this bra-burning and female anger I was startled to see, and this type of person--a girl--that aside from my sisters and mom I had absolutely no experience with); the Vietnam War (I drove to Ann Arbor to encounter the SDS, Weatherman, Black Power, Marx, Mao, anti-war protests, and read books on all these topics), and great psychedelic and angry and ecstatic folk rock music, always going to concerts. Dylan, Joni, CSNY. I had been raised to attend this very conservative Calvinist church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, going to church twice every Sunday, went to a Christian high school and Calvin College and even started out my teaching in Christian high schools, but all my teens and twenties were more about spiritual struggle, about doubt, than pure faith, and ultimately I sought how to live a spiritual and ethical life without the shackles of Calvinist religion. Or any religion, having left the church finally at 28, though at 18 I was pretty God-haunted, wanting to live as Christ, which for me was something like what I learned from Franny and Zooey, to live without ego, to live for others. Franny’s cry against ego, ego, ego was a struggle for me because I liked acting and writing stories and getting published and had set a goal to have a book of fiction published in my twenties, and Zooey’s commitment to living a life focused on perfecting a devotion not to fame but to art (for him and Franny, acting, for Buddy and me, writing) made sense for me. I struggled with the inherently self-ish nature of art/writing (writing fiction was really all about me in many ways) versus the Dr. King-commitment to changing the world (through teaching), and I still write and teach and try to balance these things. Is it okay to write a poem about myself or would it be better to write a story about students in an urban classroom? Are both okay?
I was struck in this present reading of the book that Salinger has two basic “ghosts” in the “machine” of his art; one is the war, since he served in WW II and was part of the liberation of concentration camps and fought at D Day and other significant battles. His turn to Zen and Hinduism is a turn away from the enlightenment Reason that had led to the Holocaust and Hiroshima, that Drive to Certainty that led/leads to Corporate America and the Military-Industrial Complex. So much Darkness. So he writes of Buddy’s retreat from consumerism and mass media that became his own retreat, and Franny and Zooey help us see self-lessness as a remedy for the madness of the world. A second ghost in Salinger’s work is Innocence, Beauty, something the War ended for the world in many ways, and very specifically ended for him personally when the girl he had loved at 20, 16 year old Oona O’Neill, left him for Charlie Chaplin when he was abroad fighting the War. Salinger is severely criticized by some for his lifelong interest in younger women, but the way I see it work out in his fiction is that young children, and maybe particularly girls, okay, come to symbolize innocence for him, beauty, things that got destroyed by the war and the adult world, generally, so in this book you see Buddy, Seymour, Zooey, all notice young girls and sort of hold them up with some frail hope as what we must in some sense hold on to (innocence, I mean): (“We got to get ourselves back to the Garden,” Joni Mitchell says). Holden wants to play catcher in the rye to save children from growing up and going crazy from phoniness and materialism and selfishness and Franny is just entering adulthood and is seeing the emptiness of much of the (post war) self-absorbed world and so is Zooey who has had five years of “success” in it. It’s hard to have integrity in this world, they seem to say, and I feel the same way as I did then about this: I agree with them.
When I first read this book I think part of my attraction to it was class envy, too. I was a working class kid whose Dad worked himself to the bone every day, long days, all his life, and I wanted a more contemplative, artistic live with plenty of time for reflection. Franny and Zooey were messed up in certain ways, sure, but they seemed to have enough leisure to spend time talking about Big Ideas and Purpose and the Meaning of Life, and because they were educated, and in the upper middle class, they had time for that. My parents and siblings were high school graduates and weren’t into reading or the arts (except sis Nancy, an artist) or serving the world like social workers or teachers did, and like I was considering doing. I knew I needed college to help me carve out a scholarly/artistic life. When I read Franny now I can see that class envy I had. I wanted that life of privilege, though I wanted some kind of authentic spiritual life, too. I was still In the Church and hoping to find a way to Be Me in it. So I didn't think of the Glass family as merely rich and privileged whiny kids as many do now in reading them; I saw them as having a life of ideas I wanted for myself.
Now as I read Franny and Zooey again I feel a little nostalgic for the explicit struggles with faith and religion that I had then. Franny’s struggle makes me long for that, moves me, makes me realize my life is missing something. Maybe, I think, I need a little of that praying-without-ceasing stuff that my friend Tony is experiencing in his Grand Rapids urban ministry. Zooey inspires me to live that better spiritual life, anyway. While I did not choose it, Salinger’s retreat from NYC makes perfect sense to me now. The struggle for Salinger and Buddy and Zooey was to live life without arrogance (okay, Zooey’s a little blunt and even a little mean to Bessie, and Franny, even when he is right), without being judgmental, which I find pretty difficult to do in this Tea Party world.
What do I learn or relearn about teaching and learning from it? I relearn there’s a big difference between knowledge and wisdom, and that schools generally teach the former without the latter, which is what gets us in so much Trouble. I relearn that sometimes the Eastern “no knowledge” or unknowing would be better for us than the certainty that leads to arrogance. That being good and doing good teaching and writing and art without ego if at all possible is better than any honor or award or accomplishment or even paycheck. There’s a Dr. Tupper that teaches Franny who is actually a fraud, a fake, a pretentious academic phony. Having read of him, how can I not resist being like him as I teach this class, this book? I loved this book then and love it even more now as I think I understand it better. It’s a kind of preaching/teaching book with a moral to it, but it’s one I like.
And what gorgeous writing there is in this book, with terrific dialogue, especially, completely convincing and real to me. The Glass family is a kind of prototype for the Royal Tenenbaum family, too, in many ways, all these precocious, f’ed up rich kids never really quite adjusting to the world. Dealing with the madness of the world in ways that bring them close to madness. My reading and teaching have come full circle back to issues of self (in good ways) they hadn’t really seen in any focused way for decades. I’m glad for the trip back and forward now through the reading. Oh, and I just saw the recent Salinger biography after I read it which I thought was terrible on the whole but still sometimes interesting. Leave him alone, we say, it's his choice, but we still obsess about him and want to talk with him.
Rating: really liked it
"Well you are
stupid Mum, you are one of the most
stupid people I know, really what were you
thinking when you decided to even
read this for God's sake." Lights another cigarette. "I mean to say, for God's sake, it's full of this kind of histrionic dialogue with
incessant overuse of italics, and the people in it don't so much
speak as
hold forth as if they were on the stage somewhere for God's sake, and they just go
on and on about Jesus and
chakras and
anahata and all this goddam mystical stuff, well surely
Mother you should have realised that you wouldn't really enjoy it all that much, I mean it's not
you is it? Mysticism and religion and stuff, you never did get that did you, so
why did you read it for chrissake?"
Mother also lights a cigarette. Franny has one too, and Zooey, and Bloomberg, the cat, doesn't want to feel left out so has a cigar too.
"Also, for God's sake, you could die of secondary smoke poisoning just
reading this, and you know how much you hate cigarette smoke."
"But I'm - I don't know - I'm
tired Zooey. I'm just exhausted, frankly."
Yup, me too, Fran, me too.
Rating: really liked it
This is in actuality two short stories combined by the enigmatic writer to form a novel and even together not very long at that.. The opening looks rather ordinary a boy waits for his girl at a train station ( set in the 1950's) in an unnamed city in the eastern U.S., as the unpleasant cold, winter weather freezes the college student's bones. Lane Coutell is ambitious, happy, wants to make a splash in the world just the opposite of his girlfriend, Franny ( Frances) Glass of the brilliant yet troubled large family. Disillusioned by college, teachers are idiots and hypocrites, like their victim the students. Only caring about themselves and lacking passion for their jobs, going through the motions and nothing more...acting. FRANNY HAS SEEN THE LIGHT having read a book, "The Way of the Pilgrim " and its sequel, "The Pilgrim Continues his Way" by an anonymous writer a poor peasant, with a bad arm, a seeker of truth trying to find God's will from the 19th century , he wandered through massive Russia. Speaking to countless people most very friendly surprisingly, monks are glad to talk about religion to the amiable pilgrim . Franny becomes enamored (obsessed a better word) by these books, carrying them around in her purse. The much anticipated weekend crashes... like a baseball striking a glass window (pun intended). Fainting spells, arguments about teachers in their respective schools, what is really important, life in general an unpleasant atmosphere ....Second part Zooey, ( Zachary) a good- looking t.v. actor, however not a big man at 25, five years older than his little sister pretty Franny, both are at their parents apartment in New York City. He is trying to read somehow an old letter while taking a bath, mother enters...Zooey calls her Bessie and the father Les, former showbiz stars she is worried about Franny now sleeping on the couch in the living room, arriving a few days ago from the disastrous weekend, sick in heart and body...Begs him to talk to her, afraid the daughter is having a nervous breakdown, the uncomfortable son agrees. The siblings discuss her strange behavior she hates school, friends and professors quits acting in her college play everything is stupid, nothing matters but becomes a fanatical reader of the poor Pilgrim's thoughts about Jesus...Small book with big ideas ...still not loved by all in truth, heavyweight or lightweight material...you decide. I myself believe it was well worth the rather confusing trip.
Rating: really liked it
Salinger offers us a pretty quest for spirituality in a very greedy world. His particular style oscillates between a sensibility on the skin and absolute brutality peculiar to his heroes.
A jewel.
Rating: really liked it
Did you know that Zooey Glass was voted
People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1961?
What? No, I’m kidding. Why would you have ever believed that? Did you think the magazine even
existed back in ’61? Geez.
But if it did, fictional or not, Zooey could almost certainly have been a contender. And back then he would have been eligible, too. Of course, you wouldn’t get the Zooey Glass looks without a little of the Zooey Glass attitude, and are you sure you’d want to have dealt with that? It was a little...I don’t know...caustic? At least three levels above endearing sarcasm (and those are three levels in the wrong direction, by the way), Zooey could chew you up and spit you out without even blinking an eye. But yeah, I get it. He’s hot.
Franny’s not so bad looking herself, but she—like her delightful brother—may not have made the best dinner date companion. Franny, who seems to me an older, wiser, and less retarded version of Holden Caulfield (and I say this affectionately because I love Holden in all his beautiful retardedness), expresses a whole slew of disgust for the world around her, and for the state of the arts and of academia in particular. In fact, they both do (Franny and Zooey), to an extent that is both sad and comical at the same time.
So what is up with the Glass kids? Why are they so
damaged? Zooey attributes their psychological issues (his and Franny’s) to their older brothers Seymour and Buddy, one of whom is dead, and the other being a stand-in for Salinger himself (or so I’ve read), as they practically forced their intellect onto their younger siblings at an impressionable age, critically injuring their ability to be happy later, and isolating them from a society that can’t comprehend their lofty criticisms of...well, nearly everything. I mean, don’t you think Franny and Zooey would have
preferred to be as carefree as other members of society seem to be? Wouldn’t they wish to trade their brainiac existence, at least occasionally, for a some flip-flops and iced tea? Well, in the end, maybe not.
I liked this book very much. I loved the Glass family, as messed up as they are, along with its matriarch. I thought it interesting, too, how reading this was like reading a play. Aside from Buddy’s letter to Zooey,
Franny and Zooey has a clear delineation of three distinct scenes in two distinct acts. The sets are simple, yet close attention is paid to their design. Actor positions are described at every turn. Maybe it’s just me...maybe I wanted this to be a play for some weird reason, but it’s also what appealed most to me about the book, I think. It is the dialogue between the actors (and it is almost always one-on-one) that elucidates their character and it is the characters that made me love this book as much as I did.
Oh, and Zooey Glass is hot.
Rating: really liked it
I have no idea what life would be like if I were an emotionally edgy genius. Apparently the children of the Glass family, Salinger’s favorite creation, would have made a quick work out of me. You see, obviously I’m very average, the mediocrity that Franny Glass is appalled by and yet pretends - even to herself - to envy. These young people, apparently, are very much not average or mediocre.
“I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”
And I can’t even pretend that I understand or “get” this book.
“All I know is I’m losing my mind,” Franny said. “I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting—it is, it is. I don’t care what anybody says.”
Is it about elitism, pseudointellectualism and dangers of it? About the crisis of intellectual and idealistic youth faced with the cynical egotistical and exquisitely materialistic world? About the fragility of sense of self and breakdown in the face of the world that is painfully not what you want - what you need - it to be? About the mote in your neighbor’s eye and the beam in yours? The innate hypocrisy even in the best of us? The dangers of religious fervor or maybe the bizarre appeal of it? The lingering scars of a strange unconventional childhood? The need to get over yourself and do your damn part for the ubiquitous Fat Lady that is all of us? Or maybe it’s all pretentiousness and self-indulgence or maybe profound musings on the existential angst and the human condition? Or is it about a deep depression that you can’t get a person out of by simply arguing the uselessness of it?
“But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.”
Or maybe it’s all about the strange overuse of italics? Or a piece of literature sponsored by tobacco industry - the words spoken between cigar and cigarette drags a few times per page? And is Franny pregnant or not?
Or maybe it’s a book I should have read in college to really “get” it - just like Holden’s story spoke to me when I was just entering adolescence, at the prime age for all the angst?
F*ck if I know.
“Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you’re able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can’t you use the same energy to stay well and busy?“
All I know for certain is that those gifted angsty young geniuses obviously need to be nicer to their mother. Ungrateful brats. Get off my lawn!
Help me, oh those gifted ones who actually understand this book. Help me figure out what the hell I just read. I’ll be thankful to you forever. Because I want to like it - but I just don’t really *get* it. But obviously it touched so many people in the way that I want to understand.
“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.“
A deeply confused number of stars.
——————
Recommended by: James
Rating: really liked it
Most people of my generation read JD Salinger's A Catcher in the Rye back in high school, were amused by it's vulgarity and forthrightness and then forgot about it. I personally haven't reread it since. Instead, for this online Yale class on US lit since 1945, I read Franny and Zooey as it is on the syllabus. It is an interesting diptych. The shorter first part has Franny Glass meeting her boyfriend Lane at Yale and going to eat before a football game (Yale-Harvard perhaps.) The boyfriend rereads her last love letter to him and meets her at the train station. His attitude is that she is more of a trophy girlfriend. Franny, it turns out, is a basketcase. When they get to the restaurant, she lays into him for no apparent reason, cries in the bathroom, returns to drink a second martini on an empty stomach (leaving her chicken sandwich - how uncouth and uncivilized to have ordered such peasant food muses Lane), and then passes out at the bar. Curtain falls. Act 2 happens in the Glass house (an apt name for this cracked family) with her brother taking a long bath and conversing with his mother Bessy as both of them chain smoke (he in the tub hidden behind the shower curtain, his mother sitting clothes in a kimono, on the toilet. Besides the normal son-mother banter, we learn that Zachary (Zooey's real name) is 25 and one of 7 children that were all child TV stars on a game show. Both Bess and Zooey are worried in their own ways about Franny (now home resting after the Yale incident.) If this all sounds rather banal, well, it is. The real story here is about the obsession of the oldest brother, Seymour (who committed suicide some time before) with two books about that essentially talk about reaching a godlike state by saying a simple prayer to Jesus. Franny has since taken the two books out of the abandoned bedroom of the deceased brother and is in a state of nervous breakdown as she recites the lines over and over again in her head and yet is not reaching the spiritual state she thought she would. Zooey is somewhat more able to deal with the heavy atmosphere in the house (another of the siblings having been killed in WWII) by being completely pitiless and devoid of feeling and continuing a somewhat successful theatrical career. By the end of the book, he is able finally to breakthrough Franny's blockage by telling her that essentially, she is trying too hard and needs to believe in herself rather than in this repetitive prayer.
While not a masterpiece, it is an interesting story where Salinger is seemingly satirizing the Beats and their canned Buddhist-inspired pretensions to art and saying that one must engage with the world rather than run from it. He is also describing the damage that early fame does to children in undermining any moral foundation they may have had into selfishness and materialism. It is not clear however what alternative he proposes as Lane is as superficial and uncaring in his own pretentious Ivy League way that Zooey is on his artistic high horse.
The writing is interesting and fast-paced. It does make me want to go back and read A Catcher in the Rye to see if what Salinger really idealized in that book because in this one, we primarily see what he demonizes. The one really beautiful, human moment is the one I mentioned at the end.
And I believe that should you read this short book, you will find that despite the details I mention here, I fo not believe to have spoiled the story for you because most of the meaning and interest lies in the many dialogs. Let me know if you decide to read it and how you react to it.
