Details
Synopsis
The book comprises a novella and a short story, both about members of Salinger's famous Glass family, the central figures in most of his later fiction. In "Franny," a bright college student (Franny Glass), like Holden Caulfield in THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, is unable to resolve the conflict between her deepest self and the superficiality of the world. In "Zooey," after Franny's nervous breakdown, her brother Zooey urges her to accept the world and seek to perfect herself.
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend--the weekend of the Yale game."
Industry Reviews
"The worst of American sophistication today is that it is so bored, so full of categorical aversion to things that writers should never take for granted and never close their eyes to. The fact that Salinger's work is particularly directed against the 'well fed sun-burned' people at the summer theater, at the 'section men' in colleges...at the 'three-martini' men--this, indeed, is what is wrong. He hates them. They are no longer people, but symbols...The problem is not one of spiritual pride or of guilt; it is that in the tearing of the 'sympathetic bond' it is not love that goes, but the deepest possiblilites of literary art."
Atlantic Monthly - Alfred Kazin (08/01/1961)
"This seems to be the nub of the trouble: Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them....He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation. 'Zooey' is just too long; there are too many cigarettes, too many goddams, too much verbal ado about not quite enough....The Glass saga...potentially contains great fiction. When all reservations have been entered...about the direction he has taken, it remains to acknowledge that it is a direction, and that the refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."
New York Times Book Review - John Updike (09/17/1961)
"[The book] has a certain seductive lure; there is a kind of lulling charm in being assured in that dazzling Salinger prose that one's...urban hangover, one's own horridness, is really not horridness at all but instead a kind of dark night of the soul....'Franny & Zooey' is finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger's tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers..."
National Review - Joan Didion (11/18/1961)
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