Not my favorite Salinger and not the best place to start, it's nevertheless a fantastic novel continuing on the Eastern and philosophical themes of Nine Stories. ( )

This being one of my husband's all-time favorite books, I really wanted to love it more than I did. The writing is clearly brilliant, the characters are some of the most vivid I have ever read, and the heavily italicized dialogue had wonderful rhythms. But the themes...good god (no pun intended), the themes! Too much religious mumbo jumbo substituting for actual--for lack of a better word--stuff happening. And I was relieved to note after a little research that even John Updike in 1961 thought there was the suggestion, intended or not, that Franny was pregnant, (NY Times) and yet, clearly this never gets addressed in the second story, though I kept waiting for it. Perhaps I'm too much of a heathen to really understand this book, but the spiritual themes felt terribly forced on otherwise interesting characters. ( )

Nine Stories may be his greatest work, but this is my favorite of Salinger’s books. The religious themes can be a little heavy-handed, but these two short stories about Franny and Zooey Glass, two young adults trying to recover from being precocious children, are about as well-written as fiction can be. ( )

This is one of Salinger's best. I absolutely love his stories about the Glass family. Seymour and Franny are my favorites. ( )

Franny and Zooey are sister and brother, who grew up in quite a large, educated and eccentric family. The two chapter story pivots around Franny's interest in a religious book that she found in her elder brothers' room, the 'Jesus Prayer' that she is saying and her near nervous breakdown.

I loved chapter one of this book and even though chapter two focused largely on religion it was still interesting. The further explanation about the use of theatre in the novel, as described in the Yale lecture was also thought provoking. ( )

A friend's daughter, a prolific reader and 13-year-old, read "Catcher in the Rye" and immediately checked out the rest of Salinger from the library. "Franny and Zooey" is on her top 10 favorites of all time. And with Salinger in the news, I finally picked up this book. While I still prefer "Catcher," I liked this one too. I hope he has a safe full of manuscripts! ( )

This is without a doubt one of the most enjoyable books I've had the pleasure to read. I can't quite put my finger on what made it so wonderful but I couldn't put it down and after finishing I wanted to read it for the first time all over again! A friend asked me after reading 'For Esme, with love and squalor' if there was anything else out there of a similar type and all I could say was, read 'Franny and Zooey' because there really is nothing out there like Salinger. ( )

The best of JD I think is this book.
I have read this book so much it has become personal. I think once in a while you find a book that captures your life's essence, your mythologies and sentimentalities all in one book. This book does this for me. ( )

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. ( )

franny was ok but zooey was so tedious. he was young and knew it all and the mother wore a hairnet! ( )

Part of the Glass Saga. I wouldn't start with this one if you are just getting into Salinger though. He definitely has a distinctive style that takes some getting used to. That said, I loved this book-- you can't help but feel like the characters are your own. Wonderful. ( )

This isn’t for everyone. This isn’t for me. The book is all dialogue and description. Which isn’t inherently a bad thing but in this instance it didn’t really do anything for me. There are a few interesting exchanges, mostly between Zooey and his mother, but mostly I just found it all uninteresting. I didn’t feel as if anything had happened. Or that anything had been explained. Zooey talks and talks and then finally stops. That’s it. ( )

Haha. My review. Okay. I can't believe I just read this finally at 42. Actually my wife read it to me.

To me the joy of Salinger is in the details. It's practically like reading Proust in some ways. The action is incredibly slowed down by the dense narration of every infinitesimal second as it passes.

It seems quaint. The smoking, the telephones, the plots of Zooey's television scripts. The New York-ness when they don't even leave the apartment. Most of all the books. No those aren't quaint, they're loveable, the sagging shelves of dog-earred paperbacks.

How does the Glass family manage to be so charming, loveable, tragic and broken all at once? And a little loathsome with their self-aggrandizing, painfully over-intellectualized, rants at each other and themselves?

And what about the religion in it? Does Zooey really believe there's a bit of Jesus in every one of us, in every member of any audience, and that he (as well as Franny) has to act his best for them? And that makes Franny feel better after her intellectual crisis, which in a way was really about how unbearably stupid the rest of the people in the world seem to be if you're a Glass? And lastly, am I an insufferable idiot for empathizing with that feeling? Or does everyone feel that the rest of the world is unbelievably moronic too? During the reign of Bush II this certainly has seemed often to be the case. ( )

Salinger does a great job developing the characters. I think I have a pretty good idea what each of the players is like and how they would act in various situations. But... there's always one of those... wow, I couldn't have really cared less. He didn't manage to make me care one bit about the characters or the outcome. And there was no real outcome either. It was a fiction author's thinly veiled excuse to philosophize and to prove to everyone how many different allusions he could make or how smart he was. To my view, rather pointless and dare I say it? Boring.

Ideas on religion, thinly wrapped up in dialogues that tend to deteriorate into monologues.

The best piece is Franny’s little monologue on the phone, at the end of the second part (“Zooey”). She provides us with a fresh and sensible account of everything she herself and the reader have been suffering from her brother Zooey up till that point.

Zooey is arrogant and his jokes are poor, but the narrator seems to think of him as a brave and tormented übermensch.

The narrator also thinks that mental breakdowns are best cured with ideas. Get your ideas straight and… up you go, into the world!

Contrary to popular belief this is not a wise book. ( )

I can't get enough of Salinger's intelligensia-obsessed, funny, note perfect and vocabulary-boosting New York stories. Franny and Zooey is wonderful. ( )

If it weren't for the fact that this was written by Salinger, I might have flung it away in frustration mid-way into Zooey. Franny amused me, as did Salinger's somewhat chaotic writing style - all tirades and mind-numbing rambles. Still, I'm glad I persevered and finished it, for the ending was enjoyable. I liked it, but it's still going into the resale box, rather then back onto my bookshelf. ( )

Existential angst for the rest of us. What can I say? I love Salinger's characters. Also of note, The Royal Tenenbaums is almost like a sequel to this book (along with most other Salinger books). ( )

http://bookchronicle.wordpress.com/20... ( )

I will read this book twenty more times in my life at least. I love all things written by Salinger, but this one has a special place in my heart. It's a perfect jewel of a book. Characters so nuanced that they seem like they're reading over your shoulder. Each conversation sounds completely unrehearsed and fresh.

Contains two interrelated stories. The 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. ( )