There are books I enjoy reading that I will recommend to anyone happily, unreservedly, because I feel pretty sure you will enjoy them, too. Then there are books like this, which I find diverting and worthy, but also somewhat dubious of merit and selective in appeal.
It is one of its authors most beloved works, but is Franny And Zooey any good? I don’t know, I guess, maybe. Sure.
Essentially a novel in the form of a linked short story and novella, Franny And Zooey is where Salinger converted from writer to spiritual advisor. His fluid writing style always followed its own mystical channels, but this marks a clear break from conventional storycraft.
First however, we get “Franny,” a fun tale of college life which captures Salinger at his enjoyable, level-headed best. It is a perfect complement to Nine Stories. I can’t think of any Salinger stories that depict college students, let alone lampoons them as deliciously as he does here:
Of the twenty-some young men who were waiting at the station for their dates to arrive on the ten fifty-two, no more than six or seven were out on the cold, open platform. The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours…each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.
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| The opening sentence of "Franny" tells us its time of year and location, "the weekend of the Yale game." Here Lane plans for a lovely weekend showing off Franny to his college chums, not realizing what he is in for. Above, a ticket he might have been holding for her (though we later learn the year of the story is 1955.) Image from https://www.pictorem.com/fr/459997/1954%20Harvard%20vs.%20Yale%20Football%20Ticket%20Stub%20Art.html |
Vibrant undergraduate Franny Glass is dating one of these men, Lane Coutell, a pensive, stuck-up sort whom Franny sees through with a kind of existential despair. The more he talks, the more she falls into a profound religious crisis. “Everything everybody does is so – I don’t know – not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily,” she tells him. “But just so tiny and meaningless and – sad-making.”
The tone throughout the story is playful but serious. All Lane can think of is whether her pending breakdown will spoil his time at the big game or his chance to show off a pretty girl to friends. The story ends abruptly and ambiguously, suggesting lives lived at cross purposes.
“Franny” is my favorite part of the book. It’s also the part people seem to care least about. What garners most of their interest is the other three fourths of the narrative, the novella “Zooey.” Here we are introduced to the rest of Franny’s family, that immensely talented, somewhat cursed, impossible-to-take-seriously Glass clan.
In essence this is an overt sequel to “Franny” that actually takes up the first work from Nine Stories, “A Perfect Day For Bananafish.” In that, we met the oldest Glass sibling Seymour in the middle of what can only be described as a terrible day. “Zooey” is about its aftermath and how it is processed, particularly by sister Franny and their brother Zooey.
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| For much of "Zooey," the title character keeps his sister company while she lies on a couch in their family's overcrowded living room, trying to recover from the aftermath of her date with Lane. "We're freaks, that's all," he tells her. Above, a recreation of the scene by Seth T. Hahne from https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/714130738/franny-zooey-print-11x14 |
As Franny seems unable or unwilling to shake her sudden religious mania, Zooey tries to push her out of her funk with cold reason:
“As a matter of simple logic, there is no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who’s greedy for material treasure – or even intellectual treasure – and the man who’s greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure’s treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety percent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”
“Franny” is a story with a strong religious element; “Zooey” is a sermon hung over a thin narrative thread. At times a thrilling sermon, at other times a dreary sermon, but a sermon all the same. It does – eventually – pay off Franny’s dilemma from her opening tale and sets up a mythic framework for appreciating the Glass family.
You also get some engaging yet discursive descriptive writing about the family’s quirky Upper East Side apartment:
Most of the furniture belonged to a maplewood “set”: two day beds, a night table, two boyishly small, knee-cramping desks, two chiffoniers, two semi-easy chairs. Three domestic Oriental scatter rugs, extremely worn, were on the floor. The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books.
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| While never officially made into a movie, Franny And Zooey has been represented by filmmakers. A notable example is 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums, which both sends up and celebrates the Glass family in the form of another hyperintellectual Manhattan family. It's easier to recommend than the book. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/291115563383201877/ |
There is a richness of middle-20th century décor and culture on display, blended with an absorption of setting and mood alive to the exigencies of every passing moment.
Zooey finds himself in rapture looking out a window and sighting a small girl playing hide-and-seek with her happy dog. “The joy of reunion, for both, was immense,” Salinger writes, one lovely, tiny moment among many communicating a raw pleasure in living.
It’s quite fine writing, but enervating and frustrating, too. Extremely long conversations run entirely one way and then another. We are told the Glass children all talk like this, a habit they picked up as panelists on a children’s radio program which made the Glasses national celebrities before World War II. But it seems more an excuse for Salinger to dispense with dialogue altogether. The overall effect is rather stilted.
“Franny” first appeared as a stand-alone story in Salinger’s periodical of choice, The New Yorker, in early 1955. “Zooey” followed it over two years later. By this time The New Yorker ran whatever Salinger sent them, and at whatever length. This was unfortunate; by doing so they indulged Salinger’s increased tendencies toward repetition and minutia.
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| The first page of "Zooey" in the May 4, 1957 issue of The New Yorker, where it debuted. By this time, according to his daughter Margaret, Salinger was struggling with his spiritual direction and family life. His literary output became erratic, and soon ceased altogether. Image from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1957/05/04/zooey |
Italics litter the pages, not just entire words, but sections of single words. “He’s just so erratic. I mean he goes around and around in such horrible circles.” “…if just once in a while – just once in a while – there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!”
A hectoring tone is adopted by Zooey, a television actor on the rise who combines the usual Glass intellectual brilliance with the striking appearance of a danseur and a heavy smoking habit. When not browbeating his shaken sister about the true nature of God, he mocks his mother Bessie for being worried for her daughter. Salinger presents him as the story’s voice of truth, but he’s really quite a handful.
Bessie has the best take on her children, one I can’t help but feel Salinger skims past: “I don’t know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn’t make you happy.”
At one point to break his sister from her mood, he pretends to be his absent brother Buddy, which somehow fools her for a while because he took the precaution of covering the receiver with a handkerchief.
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| Franny's spiritual quest and ensuing despair is brought on by reading an 1884 Russian work titled The Way Of A Pilgrim (original cover and title page, above.) "But the thing is, the marvelous thing is, when you first start doing it, you don't even have to have faith in what you're doing," she tells Lane about what she calls "The Jesus Prayer." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_a_Pilgrim |
“Franny” is much more engaging for me because at the core of its conflict is not religion but madness. This presents a much more realistic concern under the circumstances, where young people living lives of purpose and meaning begin to wonder what it is all for.
Franny is a fascinating paradox as we meet her first in the form of a gushy letter (all the Glasses seem to get their own epistles) and then encounter quite a different person, clearly faking her way through a date with someone for whom she has lost respect. It’s not clear why, but either Lane’s materialism or a vague sexual encounter with him some weeks before seems to have turned her off. Lane is a stick and a snob but somewhat decent all the same, and her strain at acting nice on his behalf is played up with comic empathy for both players.
“Oh, it’s lovely to see you,” Franny said as the cab moved off. “I’ve missed you.” The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn’t mean them at all. Again with guilt, she took Lane’s hand and tightly, warmly laced fingers with him.
One bombshell she drops on Lane is that she has quit a promising acting life after finding herself to be too good at it. Franny wants to forsake appearances and dedicate herself to more cosmic truths. It is a dilemma many young people can relate to, with or without the God angle.
The shift to “Zooey” is fairly sharp, even though it takes place later the same November weekend. Instead of the usual narrative set-up, we get a long introduction from the narrator, whom we learn is brother Buddy, telling us what he plans to offer is not a story but a kind of “prose home movie.” What follows is certainly different.
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| Author J. D. Salinger earlier in the 1950s. His literary approach in Franny And Zooey has drawn admirers as well as criticism. "Few writers since [James] Joyce would risk such a wealth of words upon events that are purely internal and deeds that are purely talk," wrote John Updike. Image from https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/jul/19/is-jd-salingers-franny-and-zooey-posturing-or-profound |
Long sections of narrative detail the contents of medicine cabinets, desk drawers, and living room furnishings that in their accumulated mass “might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla.” Physical residue of the children’s idiosyncratic existence overwhelms the near-total absence of the adults they became.
We also get exhaustive treatment of the Glass family philosophy, particularly Zooey, who faults his older brothers for Franny’s condition by feeding her capacious mind with too much dogma. “An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s,” he declares.
Certainly this was Salinger’s view by the middle 1950s, and it has merits. I prefer it anyway to the more sullen rejective attitude portrayed so fulsomely by Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye. A more accepting viewpoint is espoused here, and that works for me.
But the challenge of Franny And Zooey is more than a few small repairs. It strives to take on the whole of the human condition, and beyond. For all its ambition, it can’t help but feel a bit pat. Franny And Zooey winds up more journey than destination, albeit with some scenic views.
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