I read Catcher in the Rye years ago when I was a teenager and was totally underwhelmed. I thought the story was boring and Holden Caulfield didn’t interest me at all. (I think I had just read Jane Eyre and Rochester was my idea of a “hero” for a story.) I realize now I was probably too young—and too naive—to have a clue what Salinger was trying to do. However, the novel left such a bad taste in my mouth that I vowed never to read another Salinger book ever. Luckily for me, this year Eliza (girlunderglass) persuaded me to change my mind.
Franny and Zooey is a wonderful and unique (at least for me) book. The first and shorter part of the novel, “Franny” introduces us to Franny Glass, a college coed who arrives on a train to spend a special football weekend with her Ivy League boyfriend at his school. I went to a small liberal arts college and I remember spending a couple of weekends like that—except I didn’t have to take a train because my school was coed. The second part of the story is called “Zooey” and introduces us to the Glass family and especially Franny’s brother, Zooey who is about 5 years older than she but closest to her because they are the two youngest siblings. This is a character driven novel with essentially no plot. We learn about the characters by their interactions,, conversations, and observations made by the “narrator” who is actually a much older brother that we meet at the very beginning of the book. I found the characters wonderful and the conversations fascinating and revealing and the descriptions vivid. Bottom line: I laughed, I cried, and I often stopped to “ponder” about these people. I can hardly wait to find the other stories he’s written about this family. Highly recommended. ( )

Franny and Zooey, originally published in New Yorker magazine as two distinct short stories, consists of two more or less loosely connected stories concerning the spiritual unraveling and emotional upheavals of college student Franny Glass in 50s New York. Both stories are part of an ever growing non-linear saga about the quirky, artistic, and manical Glass family whom discerning readers may recall meeting in A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948), Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters (1955), and finally in Seymour: An Introduction (1959). In Franny, Franny Glass is on her way to meet her preppy Princeton boyfriend, Lane Coutell, for a week-end of football matches and other frivolities. During dinner, Franny’s snappy banter turns to an overwrought meltdown which would be a precursor to her all-encompassing spiritual crisis that gradually unfolds in Zooey.

In Franny and Zooey, Salinger’s introspective protagonist embarks on a journey of self-discovery that marries religious fervour and social antipathy in equal measure. Despite popular opinion, the author’s masterpiece A Catcher in the Rye and this title were not nor are they meant to be interpreted interchangeably. Unlike the former masterpiece, the characters that inhabit the self-titled Franny and Zooey are prone to existential crisis of a more personal nature. Whereas Holden Caulfield has a corrosive chip on his shoulder, Franny Glass’ inner conflict is of a more metaphysical nature despite her dissatisfaction with the art of being genuine as explored in her drama classes and plays.

Interestingly enough, my reading material has recently consisted of spiritual guides that have for the most part served to alleviate the discontent that I have been feeling lately. However, I was almost disheartened to discover (via Google) Salinger’s allegedly fanatical indoctrination of Eastern religions which may have heavily influenced his family life and hermit behaviour. Oddly, I was disconcerted because idle suppositions about the legendary writer’s spiritual beliefs and behaviour may have superseded or influenced my unbiased view and analysis of Franny’s own exploration of her self. ( )

When we were teenagers, my friends and I thought J.D. Salinger was the height of sophistication: at turns ironic, falling-down funny and forever disdainful of convention and phoniness. This book, at least, hasn't worn that well for me. It consists of two long stories about different members of the Glass family, a theatrical family whose seven children are (were--the eldest, Seymour, killed himself) all brilliant, precocious and either eccentric or crazy, depending on your point of view.

Salinger has wonderfully evocative, comic gifts, which are in full display in the scene, in the first story, of Lane and Franny in the restaurant on the day of the big football game, and in the second story, of Bessie, the mother, insisting on entering the bathroom to carry on an extended conversation while her son Zooey is lounging in the bath.

But neither story has a plot, unless you count the fact that in both stories Franny, the youngest Glass child at age 20, is obsessed with saying the Jesus prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me) over and over. It's an obsession that disturbs her date, Lane, and her brother, Zooey, though in neither story is there any resolution of this conflict. By the end of the second story, the brilliant dialogue that Salinger writes has become tiresome, while Zooey's constant repetition of how he hates phonies winds up being, you guessed it, phony in its own right. ( )

Listening to it...
you can download it from: http://audiostory.ir/

hmmm...
I have just finished the first chapter...
and hmmm...I don't think I like the characters...!
I mean...somehow hatefully..! ( )

If John Cheever and Paul Coelho had set out to collaborate on The Royal Tenenbaums, the result would have been Franny and Zooey. J.D. Salinger’s short, two-part novel is the story of sister and brother, Franny and Zooey Glass, the youngest of seven precocious whiz kids who grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Ostensibly, Zooey is trying to help Franny, who is in the midst of a breakdown. It soon becomes clear, however, that both have been unmoored by the suicide of their oldest brother Seymour and the related, self-imposed academic exile of their next-oldest brother Buddy.

The problem lies in the supplemental religious education Seymour and Buddy sought fit to bestow on their youngest siblings. Frightened “at the statistics on child pedants and academic weisenheimers who grow up into faculty-recreation-room savants,” Seymour and Buddy decide to set the youngest two on a Zen-like quest for “no-knowledge” – a quest to be with God in a state of pure consciousness, or satori. As Buddy later explains in a letter to Zooey:

"We thought it would be wonderfully constructive to at least . . . tell you as much as we knew about the men – the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas – who knew something or everything about this state of being. That is, we wanted both of you to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankaracharya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence. That, anyway, was the big idea."

All this mystic education, or “religious mystification” as Salinger describes it, estranges Franny and Zooey from their childhood and college compatriots, leaving them lonely and angry. Zooey insists that they are both “freaks” incapable of being around other people as they both cling to their intellectual superiority. When Seymour’s suicide demonstrates that the supposed wisdom that comes from the quest for pure consciousness is not enough to make life worth living, the metaphysical rug gets yanked from under Franny and Zooey’s feet, precipitating their mutual breakdown.

Salinger’s book is clever, heartfelt, and sad. The value of its final lesson lies, not in understanding the details of Franny and Zooey’s existential arguments, but in appreciating the emotional crisis the siblings face. The idea that we should strive to be our best for God’s sake – and not our own satisfaction in acquiring wealth, knowledge, prestige, or even wisdom – may not be original, but it is an idea worth contemplating.

Posted on Rose City Reader. ( )