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Franny and Zooey Review
This book consists of two interrelated stories about members of the Glass family. These kids (seven of them if I remember well) are the children of a showbusiness family from New York and they used to be genius-kids who appeared on a radio show answering quizzes and philosophizing. Apparently the Glass kids had a special education in an ecumenical religiosity and philosophy, and their situation as whiz kids has led to emotional distress, much a-la Holden Caulfield but more illustrated. By the way, in terms of its central themes, this book could be said to be the closing of the full circle of Caulfield's story. The Glasses, just like Caulfield, are intelligent people, very frustrated with the inadequacies of life in general and the people who surround them. They are very neurotic in a New York way. They are angry because people aren't as intelligent as they should be, and because the ways of the world are not what reason and humanism tell us they should be. How to cope with it?In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her preppy and also intellectualizing boyfriend for a football weekend. They go to a cafe to have some food (and drinks and cigarettes). The story is simply the account of their talk. Salinger is one of the greatest masters of frenzied and fast dialogue, and it shows here. Franny is telling his boyfriend about all the phoniness of campus life, about the lunacy and presumptuosness of teachers and classmates. She tells him how she has read a book about a Russian monk who discovers a special Jesus prayer. If you repeat this prayer incessantly, it will become a part of you and repeat itself automatically, bringing you closer to grace and peace. The conversation starts getting out of hand as Franny gets carried away and as the boyfriend becomes rather estranged, until Franny collapses on her way to the restroom. When she wakes up, she is constantly whispering the Jesus prayer.
In the second story, Franny is at her parents' home in NY, recovering from her nervous breakdown. In a long talk with her brother Zooey (both of them being the youngest Glass children), they confront each other's traumas, weaknesses, genius and problems with the world. Zooey is also extremely talented and aware of the inadequacies of the world, but he seems to be in a (slightly) better emotional phase than Franny. The dialogue is moving, neurotic and masterful. After they argue rather violently, Zooey goes to another room and calls Franny pretending to be an older brother living away. In a further conversation Zooey forces Franny to understand that following a simple but futile recipe will not do the trick. The Jesus prayer is not enough: we have to accept the world as it is as well as the people around us. We can not be "catchers in the rhye". But we should live an ethical life, just because (which made me think of Kant's "categorical imperative"). As Seymour Glass, the eldest brother, once said to Zooey, sometimes you have to do things "for the Fat Lady", that is, just because it is the right thing to do, even if no one will notice.
"Frany and Zooey" is written in a lower key. It is unprententious, unlike its characters, but deep down it is about profound questions. How to cope with this mad world filled with people who are not bright nor good? Can you save the world? How to live? Yes, sometimes we have to do things we wouldn't like to do, but we have to do it, if only for the Fat Lady.
Franny and Zooey Overview
The author writes: FRANNY came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed, in 1957 by 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 ambiguous 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.Want to learn more information about Franny and Zooey?
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