This book review should be around a 4-minute read. J.D. Salinger’s literary duet Franny and Zooey, composed of a short story and novella, is for anyone who is like Franny Glass and is “sick of just liking people” (15).
The book turns on the lives of siblings Franny and Zooey Glass who are not characters you can just like. In its first part, Franny screams how “Everything everybody does is so…not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and – sad-making” (21). Her violence of feeling and speech is equalled by her brother’s. When Zooey’s mother interrupts his bath in the second part, he tells the “fat old Druid” (83): “if you don’t get out of this bathroom I’m going to set fire to this this ugly goddam [shower] curtain” (58). His words are gut punches. Some are thrown from angles no one thought of until Salinger did. Such extremity and originality of expression shows characters passionately alive. Franny and Zooey aren’t “tiny and meaningless.” They’re characters who you can love or hate but not just like.
Franny and Zooey’s relentless and explosive power of personality is matched by one other: Salinger himself. His unique narrative point of view puts him inside the story like a character. The point of view is third person omniscient. It’s able to look from Franny to Zooey then back to Franny then over to her boyfriend Lane and their mother Bessie. But Salinger rarely looks inside his characters’ minds. He doesn’t act omniscient but mostly watches them like he was sitting at a table with them. As he watches, Salinger remarks how Lane talks like “someone does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good quarter of an hour” (9). Franny, Salinger says, listens while serving a “self-imposed sentence of unadulterated good-listenership” (10). Salinger shares Franny and Zooey’s passionate indignation and originality of speech. It comes out as both acidic sarcasm and glorious hyperbole. Salinger is just as alive in telling his story as any of his characters are in living it.
Franny and Zooey may treat you like Franny treats a collection of unfortunate cushions. It may be a “therapeutic beating up.” A shock if you’re not used to people like Franny, Zooey, and Salinger. But a healthy one if you want to see people who are so alive.
(The page references are for the edition of Franny and Zooey published by Penguin in 2019).
William Barker-Writer and Philosopher 