It was always a little embarrassing to admit that I hadn't read Franny and Zooey. In the literary world, I guess it's kind of the equivalent of a beauty queen admitting she wears dentures. Somewhere in between that admission and the other one (that I found `Catcher in the Rye' tolerably okay but not a masterpiece) those who saw me in equal standing begin to hee and haw and slap their knees from mirth over my taste--as if I drink sherry to get drunk (I do).

Well, now this lack is no longer a flaw to lug with me to the next book club meeting. I am properly initiated into the J.D. Salinger fan club. I loved Franny and Zooey. I loved Franny's entrance, her run-on letters to her lover, her ever so innocent religious fanaticism. I loved Zooey's interaction with Mrs. Glass, loved Zooey taking a bath, Franny's fragile breakdown, and Zooey's marvelous intentions and ultimate belief that no matter how tiny or clownish we are, we are all the "children of man."

The way it was put together, however sliced in interims, was hemmed with incredible talent. It was put together so elegantly, so mired in everyday dialogue, that I'll have to read it again to really get all the twists and turns and subtle metaphors that Salinger laid out like kitchen towels on the blank countertops of the un-inked page.

At this point, I have finished all of the Glass saga that is printed in book form. I doubt, alas, that I shall have the gumption or masochism (whichever way you look at it) to go find the remainder on the IntarWub.

I finished this book last of the Glass saga (including Nine Stories, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction). While it was better than the latter two novellas (largely bettered by the absence of Seymour: An Introduction), it still has all of the pretentiousness of some of the worst of Salinger.

Particularly infuriating points, personally, include the asinine practice of italicizing approximately one third of any word longer than six letters for the majority of the saga. Whilst this would be understandable (and merely odious) if it were simply the precocious Glass children and their parents (or even including Grandpa Zozo, etc.), it spreads like a virulent cancer into other, non-family members. This transforms it from an obnoxious family trait of condescending verbal skills into purely bad writing. Ah, what a treat.

Also, I enjoyed the final deconstruction of the vaunted Eastern tradition of the 1950's by Zooey Glass, even if it was immediately followed by an insipid, mawkish return to same a few pages later. Boys and girls, the East does not have the answers that the West has somehow lost. IT DOESN'T. It was refreshing to see Zooey bemoan the farcical training and teaching that Buddy and Seymour have given him, and it was nice to see a formal vilification of this kind of teaching, alas it is too late, since Salinger spends so much time admiring it in the other stories. :(

That said, there was little commendable in either of these stories. The characters act like spoiled children, as we may well expect of the last two children of the Glass family. Their comments, their nauseating pleas for intelligence on the part of the remainder of the human race, are all that is called for by those who consider themselves above the rest of us. How sweet it would be if there was a point wherein the Glass children, one by one, or all at once, realized that they too are children of desire and that they are no better, indeed, no different, from the mooing bovine masses that surround them.

No doubt, this review will be commented upon and negatively reviewed by the thousands who consider Salinger a latter day Jesus. Oh well. For those of you who are critically considering reading ANYTHING of the Glass saga, read Zooey, and then stop. Or, read A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Teddy, and Zooey, and then stop. Read more of it if you want to suck down pretentious, obnoxious, and odious fiction.

Harkius

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.

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.

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.