The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 4 September 2010
by J. D. Salinger
This little book is made up of two stories Salinger had published in The New Yorker in 1956 and 1957, and it is, at first, tempting to draw parallels between these stories and The Catcher in the Rye. In the latter, Holden Caulfield repeatedly declares his disdain for "phoneys" and in this book, Franny Glass expresses her disgust with "ego" in all its self-aggrandizing forms. Franny opens at the train station of some unnamed New England or New York college town, where young men wait for their girlfriends coming up for the weekend of the Big Game against Yale. Lane Coutell is looking forward to three days of cocktail parties and football with Franny, but, when she arrives, he has to deal with her changed mood. All the ego and posing of college life has cast Franny into a crisis bordering on a breakdown. She just doesn't want to play the game any more, and a source of her despair might be a little cloth-bound book she is carrying. The story comes across as a little portrait of Lane's puzzlement at his girl's transformation from carefree coed to budding philosopher.
In Zooey, (first published more than a year after Franny) much of this transformation is explained. This story is near novel-length, and is a more complete portrait of Franny and Zooey Glass's sprawling family of New York intellectuals. It is also an entertaining and surprisingly biting intellectual journey (one can see why The New Yorker would like it). Franny and Zooey are two of seven siblings who, as children, were precocious and successful contestants on a radio quiz show. Elder brothers Buddy and Seymour took it upon themselves to impart a spiritual education on their younger brother and sister, from which they have suffered ever since. Zooey is bathing and carrying out a meticulous grooming routine as he has a long and cranky conversation with his scatter-brained chain-smoking mother, Bessie. She is worried about Franny, and Zooey wants Mom to just back off. But he has a good talk with Franny, who has for days been prostrate on the family's sofa. The conversation is sprawling and pointed. Franny is taken with The Way of the Pilgrim, the nineteeth- century story of a Russian mystic who transforms his spiritual life by chanting a prayer to Jesus, a prayer that sounds more like a Buddhist or Hindu mantra. And that might be the point of Salinger's story, as he had his own spiritual quest that spread across disciplines. Zooey is genuinely trying to help Franny find a way out of her spiritual despair, to help her find a way to live in a world of ego (and of "phoneys"). The conversations are jarring in their abrupt frankness, but Salinger's message is almost sly in the way it develops from what, at first, appears a mere portrait of off-beat urban intellectuals. His settings are meticulously observed and his characters idiosyncratic. It is a clever and subtly brilliant book.