It rides on the catcher's coattails

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	• Franny and Zooey J.D. Salinger Back Bay Books, 2001 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 220 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

It rides on the catcher's coattails

The book is divided into two parts, "Franny" and "Zooey." It's not so much a novel as a first short story that ends abruptly, begging more, and therefore engenders a second short story that tries to wrap it up. I have a feeling it makes more sense to readers in their late teens or early twenties (and preferably from New York) than it made to me as a much older reader. It's the manifestos of two bright, intellectual, strong-willed young people, but really more Zooey's than Franny's. It's great writing page by page but less successful as a whole than Catcher in the Rye. One of the virtues of Catcher is that Salinger doesn't make claims about preciousness or genius in Holden; so Holden comes off more human than Franny or Zooey--more tortured, more vulnerable, more a victim of his own time and psyche, more inviting of compassion and much easier to identify with. I wonder whether Salinger wanted to somehow get closer to Franny than he managed to do in F&Z. It's as though Zooey pirates the book and cuts us off from what might otherwise have been a great female counterpart story to Holden's.

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Entertaining and intelligent

Franny and Zooey is not really a single novel. Rather, it's more like two novellas, though the novellas have overlapping characters. These stories, originally published in The New Yorker magazine, concern Franny and Zooey Glass, two members of the family that was the subject of most of Salinger's short fiction (and also the Wes Anderson movie The Royal Tannenbaums). Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the "Jesus prayer" as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown. In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the "Jesus prayer" is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails. Entertaining and intelligent.

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FRANNY AND ZOOEY by J. D. Salinger

Franny and Zooey (1961) is J. D. Salinger's two-part novel about an intellectual and spiritually unfulfilled girl and her intellectual, snobbish brother. This novel features the Glass family, which Salinger has written about on other occasions. The majority of the book consists of three lengthy conversations: between Franny and her boyfriend, between Zooey and their mother, and between Franny and Zooey. The novel is so dialogue-heavy it reads very much like a play. The book's primary theme is spirituality, particularly of an Eastern bent (which is what Salinger himself was so fascinated by).

What Salinger does very well is communicate his characters' feelings subtly, through their speech and behavior, rather than by narration, which takes all the style out of things. The reader really feels like he or she gets to know Franny and Zooey (neither of them is particularly likeable, but that's beside the point).

While the dialogue between Salinger's characters is generally quite good, they all have the unbearable tendency to launch into unrealistic and lengthy monologues at any given moment. Here, at times, Salinger is in effect preaching to the reader.

Inexplicably, Salinger is eternally focused on smoking. The reader always knows what each character is smoking, whether it's lit, and what hand he or she is holding it in. It's to the point of distraction, and serves no reasonable purpose other than to briefly interrupt interminable monologues. Salinger also displays other tendencies to micromanage his characters and their world (he gives ridiculously long descriptions of certain things, most egregiously the contents of the medicine cabinet).

Ultimately, Franny and Zooey's downfall is that it doesn't particularly go anywhere. There's no real payoff. Two hundred pages of pampered, superior huffing and puffing, while entertaining at times and tedious by the end, climaxes with an unsatisfactory piece of basic, Eastern-worldview advice that gets treated as the greatest of revelations.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

The author writes: Franny came out in The New Yorker/EM 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 ambitious 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.

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