Franny and Zooey is a book by American author J. D. Salinger which comprises his short story "Franny" and novella Zooey . The two works were published together as a book in 1961, having originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957 respectively. The book focuses on siblings Franny and Zooey, the two youngest members of the Glass family, which was a frequent focus of Salinger's writings.
"Franny" tells the story of Franny Glass, Zooey's sister, undergraduate at a small liberal arts college, probably Wellesley College. The story takes place in an unnamed college town during Franny's weekend visit to her boyfriend Lane. Disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her, she aims to escape it through spiritual means.
Zooey is set shortly after "Franny" in the Glass family apartment in New York City's Upper East Side. While actor Zooey's younger sister Franny suffers a …
Franny and Zooey is a book by American author J. D. Salinger which comprises his short story "Franny" and novella Zooey . The two works were published together as a book in 1961, having originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957 respectively. The book focuses on siblings Franny and Zooey, the two youngest members of the Glass family, which was a frequent focus of Salinger's writings.
"Franny" tells the story of Franny Glass, Zooey's sister, undergraduate at a small liberal arts college, probably Wellesley College. The story takes place in an unnamed college town during Franny's weekend visit to her boyfriend Lane. Disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her, she aims to escape it through spiritual means.
Zooey is set shortly after "Franny" in the Glass family apartment in New York City's Upper East Side. While actor Zooey's younger sister Franny suffers a spiritual and existential breakdown in their parents' Manhattan living room, leaving their mother Bessie deeply concerned, Zooey comes to Franny's aid, offering what she thinks is brotherly love, understanding, and words of sage advice.
I'm not sure why I waited so long to read this. It's better than Catcher in the Rye. Its more mature and not in the first person - completly. Through letters and monologue Salinger writes in the first person still but there are some different voice and a little narration. The short story and novella could stand alone but together the reader has a wider understanding. Some very funny parts in the first three quarters and the seriousness at the end.
Salinger obviously hates psychoanalysis (if you need no other evidence, there's the dream he gives Franny) but this book reads like a successful treatment of mental breakdown.
Franny can no longer go on with her life. She tries to have a date with Lane but her bets efforts lead to failure. She ends up back home lying on the living room couch, the destination of so many dysfunctional young adults.
If our current problems are a result of our history, Zooey blames the way Seymour and Buddy brought them up "as freaks" for the state they're in. At the same time, Zooey asks Franny if she'd like to speak to Buddy about her problem. Franny answers that she wants to speak to Seymour. Did the two oldest Glass siblings create their problem or have their solution? Or is it both?
As spiritual mentors, you couldn't pick a less successful lot. …
Salinger obviously hates psychoanalysis (if you need no other evidence, there's the dream he gives Franny) but this book reads like a successful treatment of mental breakdown.
Franny can no longer go on with her life. She tries to have a date with Lane but her bets efforts lead to failure. She ends up back home lying on the living room couch, the destination of so many dysfunctional young adults.
If our current problems are a result of our history, Zooey blames the way Seymour and Buddy brought them up "as freaks" for the state they're in. At the same time, Zooey asks Franny if she'd like to speak to Buddy about her problem. Franny answers that she wants to speak to Seymour. Did the two oldest Glass siblings create their problem or have their solution? Or is it both?
As spiritual mentors, you couldn't pick a less successful lot. Seymour has already killed himself--not usually a sign of spiritual advancement. Buddy has severed connections to the world, but not as a monk, but an academic. He has no phone except the one he left behind in his (and Seymour's) childhood room. It's as if he's saying, when you phone me, you're really only trying to reach the person I used to be.
Zooey fails to argue Franny out of her depression. Any clinician could have told him he'd fail. It would be the equivalent of telling an anorexic that they were too thin and needed to eat.
In the end, Zooey succeeds, seemingly by allowing Franny to see that God is everywhere--including in the phonies and in the chicken soup that she has been refusing. From a psychoanalytic standpoint (not the psychoanalysis of the 50s, when Salinger was writing, but the psychoanalysis of today) you could say that Franny was trying to expel the noxious bad parts of herself by projecting them on others who she then experienced as hateful. Zooey allowed her to accept the rejected parts as good--expressions of God.
Or, you can say Zooey gave her what she was explicitly requesting, namely Seymour. What she was mourning for was Seymour and Zooey reconnected her with him by sharing their mutual experiences of him.
Ultimately, what makes F&Z work as a story isn't the clinical underpinnings but the reader's identification with being the too smart freak in a world of phonies. Who doesn't hate phonies, really? Even the phonies hate them, thinking they're someone other than themselves.
That and the clever theological dialog and the choice of details. I'm looking forward to seeing more Glass.
I've always thought of this slender book as Eastern leaning, style-wise. The sure description of action, thinking and being is way closer to Tao than anything else I can think of from that era.
Talk about another world, different both from the other books that I've been reading recently and from the world that I live in. This world has fur coats and smoking in restaurants and coin-operated restroom stalls. He's a pompous fool, interested only in appearances and hearing himself talk, while she's consumed by middle-class angst. I'm left with the suspicion that her angst is really caused by a possible pregnancy. But if she's preggers, what the hell is she doing drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes?
A wide range of viewpoints. Yes, the characters were superficial and transparent, but, considering that their surname was 'Glass', probably so by design. And the angst, the spiritual groping, that Franny was suffering may seem unwarranted to us, considering the other books that we've been reading lately, but it was real enough to her. And only the well-fed and secure can really afford the luxury of …
Talk about another world, different both from the other books that I've been reading recently and from the world that I live in. This world has fur coats and smoking in restaurants and coin-operated restroom stalls. He's a pompous fool, interested only in appearances and hearing himself talk, while she's consumed by middle-class angst. I'm left with the suspicion that her angst is really caused by a possible pregnancy. But if she's preggers, what the hell is she doing drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes?
A wide range of viewpoints. Yes, the characters were superficial and transparent, but, considering that their surname was 'Glass', probably so by design. And the angst, the spiritual groping, that Franny was suffering may seem unwarranted to us, considering the other books that we've been reading lately, but it was real enough to her. And only the well-fed and secure can really afford the luxury of angst. (And according to the NLS, Zooey is pronounced zoo-ee. So what, did they call up Salinger to ask? And did he respond?) Mostly, it was considered to be an experiment, working through Salinger's own interest in Eastern religions to explore Franny's (eventual) spiritual enlightenment. And I wasn't the only one to suspect that she was pregnant. (One quote came out, that Salinger loved his characters more than they loved themselves. And it shows.)
