J. D. Salinger

'Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.' First published in the New Yorker as two sequential stories, 'Franny' and 'Zooey' offer a dual portrait of the two youngest members of J. D. Salinger's fictional Glass family. 'Salinger's masterpiece' Guardian

Franny and Zooey

A novel in two halves, Franny and Zooey brilliantly captures the emotional strains and traumas of entering adulthood. It is a gleaming example of the wit, precision, and poignancy that have made J. D. Salinger one of America's most beloved writers.

He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism, and everything that runs into physical violence is a legitimate climax to something that isn't even--

Zainab 

obwohl wir redeten und redeten und redeten, waren wir uns alle darin einig, kein Wort zu sagen. 

 Ich habe es satt, nicht den Mut zu haben, ein absoluter Niemand zu sein

clara

Listen, I don't care what you say about my race, creed, or religion, Fatty, but don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful.

And I can't be running back and fourth forever, between grief and high delight.

I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.

Kat Albanese

“One other thing. And that’s all. I promise you. But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam ‘unskilled laughter’ coming from the fifth row. And that’s right, that’s right—God knows it’s depressing. I’m not saying it isn’t. But that’s none of your business, really. That’s none of your business, Franny. An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s. You have no right to think about those things, I swear to you. Not in any real sense, anyway. You know what I mean?”

“I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.”

“As a matter of simple logic, there’s no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who’s greedy for material treasure—or even intellectual treasure—and the man who’s greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure’s treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”

“What’s the matter with you buddy? Where are you brains? If you’ve had a freakish education, at least use it, use it. You can say the Jesus Prayer from now til doomsday, but if you don’t realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don’t see how you’ll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. ‘Cessation from all hankerings.’ It’s this business of desiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why’re you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line—in one damn incarnation or another, if you like—you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You’re stuck with it now. You can’t just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to—be God’s actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to—there’s nothing wrong in trying.” There was a slight pause. “You’d better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I’m talking about. You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.”

Helen 

not a bad book, just not my type of read unfortunately. managed to finish it just bc its a short read

the narrative style draws similarities to dostoevsky’s type of storytelling/writing, which im not a fan of… 

i was just so bored and could not focus on a thing

aemouh

not a bad book, just not my type of read unfortunately. managed to finish it just bc its a short read

the narrative style draws similarities to dostoevsky’s type of storytelling/writing, which im not a fan of… 

i was just so bored and could not focus on a thing

oh my, what do i do with my heart? what to do with this lousy lump of flesh,,,

i don’t even know where to begin. this is a story of self-awareness, ABOUT self-awareness. this is my way of pilgrim… oh my. i feel like i’m this liminal state between heavy, painful self-awareness and hope, if the two realms are even adjacent.

so much is happening and the characterisation is so poignant especially when you remember that all this is just happening in one place—in franny, the diner, mostly, and in zooey, the glass house. definitely a reader’s high.

this deserves two consecutive reads. buddy’s letter hits harder on the second read seeing the parallels between zooey and franny when they’re brutally aware of the limitations in their abilities. it’s in the middle of the storm when zooey’s turning to buddy’s letter for comfort, direction, clearance of mind, of heart. and franny, she’s in this storm and it’s only amplified when she goes to seymour and buddy’s room and steals the two books for a hint of how she can handle all this impediment and viscous clinging of her limitations. zooey and franny both reach out to guidance in the form/memory of their oldest brothers buddy and seymour respectively when they’re trying to handle their limitations, when zooey cannot seem to be right in comforting franny, franny when she’s going through this turmoil on just what to do with herself.  self-awareness is a disease, the worst affliction of any kind to someone who knows fully of their handicap and nothing of how to cure themselves of it. limitations, so ironic in the presence of intelligence and so iron in its clutches.

salinger makes it clear from the start, this isn’t a story on mysticity alone, it’s a story of love. a love story. it’s a story of how the two youngest glass children of the family have been terribly burdened to manage the weight of having so heavy expectations on the world that simple cannot deliver. and they have to do this alone. the mechanisms that seymour and buddy have provided franny and zooey have proven to be limitations—limitations that restrict the world as they see it, aspects of their existence that simultaneously bind them to the world and how they access it. but they’ve all left, all too terribly burdened too especially in the wake of seymour’s passing. in that limitation, it’s so incredibly fitting that franny and zooey turn to acting, it’s what they have to do to get through life itself in all its dreariness and oversimplicity. and its so heartwrenching to know that in all that hubris that franny’s embroiled in, she comes home. home, where everything’s just as she wishes it would be, just as she so desperately tries to find meaning in the prayer, she returns to the one place that might be able to provide her with the mechanisms to make sense of all this.

the ending was very necessary to wrap up on the notion that we exist only in compromise with the world, and that’s really okay. the point isn’t to fight it, but simply to understand how that compromise works, and it comes in the form of seymour’s fat lady, of meaning even in the mundane.

☀️

oh my, what do i do with my heart? what to do with this lousy lump of flesh,,,

i don’t even know where to begin. this is a story of self-awareness, ABOUT self-awareness. this is my way of pilgrim… oh my. i feel like i’m this liminal state between heavy, painful self-awareness and hope, if the two realms are even adjacent.

so much is happening and the characterisation is so poignant especially when you remember that all this is just happening in one place—in franny, the diner, mostly, and in zooey, the glass house. definitely a reader’s high.

this deserves two consecutive reads. buddy’s letter hits harder on the second read seeing the parallels between zooey and franny when they’re brutally aware of the limitations in their abilities. it’s in the middle of the storm when zooey’s turning to buddy’s letter for comfort, direction, clearance of mind, of heart. and franny, she’s in this storm and it’s only amplified when she goes to seymour and buddy’s room and steals the two books for a hint of how she can handle all this impediment and viscous clinging of her limitations. zooey and franny both reach out to guidance in the form/memory of their oldest brothers buddy and seymour respectively when they’re trying to handle their limitations, when zooey cannot seem to be right in comforting franny, franny when she’s going through this turmoil on just what to do with herself.  self-awareness is a disease, the worst affliction of any kind to someone who knows fully of their handicap and nothing of how to cure themselves of it. limitations, so ironic in the presence of intelligence and so iron in its clutches.

salinger makes it clear from the start, this isn’t a story on mysticity alone, it’s a story of love. a love story. it’s a story of how the two youngest glass children of the family have been terribly burdened to manage the weight of having so heavy expectations on the world that simple cannot deliver. and they have to do this alone. the mechanisms that seymour and buddy have provided franny and zooey have proven to be limitations—limitations that restrict the world as they see it, aspects of their existence that simultaneously bind them to the world and how they access it. but they’ve all left, all too terribly burdened too especially in the wake of seymour’s passing. in that limitation, it’s so incredibly fitting that franny and zooey turn to acting, it’s what they have to do to get through life itself in all its dreariness and oversimplicity. and its so heartwrenching to know that in all that hubris that franny’s embroiled in, she comes home. home, where everything’s just as she wishes it would be, just as she so desperately tries to find meaning in the prayer, she returns to the one place that might be able to provide her with the mechanisms to make sense of all this.

the ending was very necessary to wrap up on the notion that we exist only in compromise with the world, and that’s really okay. the point isn’t to fight it, but simply to understand how that compromise works, and it comes in the form of seymour’s fat lady, of meaning even in the mundane.

Franny & Zooey

i was weirdly enamoured with Salinger as a preteen/ teen so rereading this for the first time a whole decade later feels very … meaningful. i think it was all the existential ennui, all the despair at meaning-making in life that resonated with me at the time. so much has changed and i have changed so much in this decade that im not sure those themes feel so connected to me anymore but through this i found myself grasping at different layers of the novel this time around. i was surprised to be just as moved by Salinger’s voice too - i expected to find him pretentious and cold but i felt a real tenderness throughout this broken family narrative and i feel so grateful in a way for this book of mirrors. i feel like Franny & Zooey will forever be a chameleon of a book for me 

lara anand

i got extremely extremely sick right around where it got to Zooey reading the letter. for a week i was barely conscious, barely able to read half a page before concking out again, and every time i picked it up i would think, ah, still the letter. i didnt think it was dragged out, more like i was so sick that time was nothing and this letter felt eerily important. the only things i remember from that week are bits of this letter and dragging myself to my semester finals which i have no memory of. i was worried what i remembered wouldn’t be enough but when i finally had the energy to pick this up again i could not put it down until i finished it. it flowed so well. Zooey is so rude but so aware of it and Franny’s crisis was so fun to read somehow. love the prose in this one, makes me want to explore his other books. i love u long ass sentences and monologues and paragraphs of rants. left me w so much to think about

syre

Grace Edwards

4.5. This was good and gave me a lot to think about. Many elements were eerily relevant to my life at the moment. Kinda like this Salinger guy.

Fenix Voliton 

Sarah Sammis

Franny and Zooey made the perfect follow up to Better Than Running at Night. Both books center around young women struggling through a personal crises in the freshman year at college. Franny struggles more than Ellie in melding her personal convictions with her experiences in college.

In "Franny" (published in the New Yorker in 1955), Franny, a member of the Glass family (a family I will revisit when I read and review Nine Stories next year), is introduced as a cheerful and enthusiastic character through a letter that her boyfriend, Lane, carries in his pocket. It has been a while since they last saw each other and the woman who steps of the train is nothing like her letter. She is withdrawn and nervous, a very changed person.

Over the course of a disastrous dinner date, Franny pours out her heart to Lane. She has become enamored with a book of eastern philosophy that she believes has the answers to all her problems. Franny's half of the story ends though before she can elaborate.

It isn't until the much longer Zooey chapter (or story, as originally published in The New Yorker in 1957) that greater details of Franny's problems are revealed. The bulk of her story comes out in a very funny but touching conversation between Zooey and his mother, Bessie Glass.

While the story is still about Franny's depression, Bessie ends up stealing the show. She is so perfectly written in all her quirks to be a fully realized person in these eight or so pages.

catalina

no me gusta calificar cuando abandono los libros pero me quedaba tan poco... 

le hubiera puesto más estrellas si las historias hubieran sido por separado, la parte de zooey me aburrió muchoo. en resumen del capítulo: for god's sake stfu.

Interesting to see ideas and critics presented through sibling squabbles like this, but i'm too liquid hearted not be affected by Zooey's ruthlessness. I'm especially bothered by his attitude to Bessie. I feel bad for Franny, but Bessie's his mother, gotta draw the line somewhere. Him being a jackass overall distracted me from whatever oh-so-brilliant ideas he spewed. It might actually be a good thing to have a character so strong that i, the reader, came to despise him personally. Hating a character shouldn't make me hate the book, which i don't. But idk, still a 3/5.

D D D 

I live guided by optimism and love, with the courage to be an absolute nobody! ☮️💌❣️🫶🫀

Favorite line in the book is when Franny is like “I was being so annoying - he should have just shot me - I would have congratulated him!”

there’s a before and after for me for this book. forever cherished. 

mina nayeri

désirée

Ann Gabrielle

i’m slightly biased and i give no fucks. salinger been fucking knew.

Interessantes Buch. Ganz anders. Es ist mit der typischen Salinger Art geschrieben, die einerseits direkt, andererseits anspruchsvoll ist. Manchmal musste ich ein paar Sätze nochmal lesen, um sie zu verstehen.

Was ich von dem Buch halte?, ich weiß es nicht. Es ist ein Buch, das dich, nachdem du es beendet hast, viel darüber nachdenken lässt und versuchst, die Message, die Zoey Franny geben wollte, zu verstehen. 

Habe den Drang, es nochmal zu lesen, weil ich mit dem Wissen, dass ich jetzt über die Charaktere habe, das Buch    ganz anders lesen werde.

Es ist angehaucht vom mystischem und christlichem. Man kann aber seine eigene islamische Schlussfolgerung ziehen.

Interessantes Buch. Ganz anders. Es ist mit der typischen Salinger Art geschrieben, die einerseits direkt, andererseits anspruchsvoll ist. Manchmal musste ich ein paar Sätze nochmal lesen, um sie zu verstehen.

Was ich von dem Buch halte?, ich weiß es nicht. Es ist ein Buch, das dich, nachdem du es beendet hast, viel darüber nachdenken lässt und versuchst, die Message, die Zoey Franny geben wollte, zu verstehen. 

Habe den Drang, es nochmal zu lesen, weil ich mit dem Wissen, dass ich jetzt über die Charaktere habe, das Buch    ganz anders lesen werde.

Es ist angehaucht vom mystischem und christlichem. Man kann aber seine eigene islamische Schlussfolgerung ziehen.



sarah

** spoiler alert **
           this is great it really is and i love the humour and all truly but like u have to understand that franny is suffering from depression and zooeys here trying to talk her out of it which is making it worse. a tragedy really.

trying to write about this book feels like moses experiencing the burning bush then going home to leave mount sinai a yelp review and i’m furious about it

the thing about salinger is that i know i was/is/will likely always be a salinger-reared writer & a glass family enthusiast by heart, but i’m only self-aware about that bc i had a period of complete insanity in my teenage years about 

. very often, i think, as a teen, any story you feel a sense of kinship with feels like uncovering the secret to—whatever. the universe inside you or its closest counterpart. you feel seen by a story and that dual exchange seems proof that there is a world within you that can be contained by something that at the same time feels so infinite and expansive. then you grow up and you realize that this is just merely the mark of any good story, this feeling of connection and recognition made infinite. salinger has always been distinct to me in that, and i know i owe a lot to how generous he is in writing introspection and letting stories just be characters being people. 

i am at the same time aware that his characters aren’t exactly what one might consider traditionally likeable even in all their nuances and idiosyncrasies, and i was sure up until just before this particular reread that i was crazy over 

 when i was younger precisely bc jaded precocious types are the sort of people you especially identify with when you’re young and pretentious about your youth and your perspective. which i very much was. however insufferable i can be now, i’d bet it was even worse in high school, before i learned to hold back and be more careful. so i figured it was a marker of what kind of book 

 was that i felt so attached to it in those years. 

 now, poke at its thematic and stylistic features with objective curiosity, then move on more certain that i’ve outgrown the reader in me that salinger appealed to. i’m not keen on identifying as a Salinger Guy. i don’t want people to ask me what my favourite book is and for me to have to actually wearily admit it’s a novel by a white guy who i know questionably earned his place in the literary canon. so it feels as though, paradoxical as it is, i’m betraying some essential part of me when i say that this book felt like it was for me five times more than it already did before and for this reason alone i can’t even dock it half a star and that’s awful bc i’m not entirely sure i’m being rational right now. i won’t recommend 

 to people per se, yet if there’s a book i love that i will allow to simplify who i am based on that one personality marker, it’s unfortunately this one.

more than anything, it’s maddening how much better it is when consumed with an (assumedly) more grown prefrontal cortex and not just a teenage, depression addled brain-heart liking it for the sake of feeling subconsciously known by it. blew me out of the park how much more layered 

is than i remember, how deftly it leaves some things understated even as it gives its characters all the room possible and more to feel like human beings. monologues will go on for paragraphs and paragraphs, descriptions of lived-in rooms will go on for pages and pages, the energy of a conversation will sustain itself ad infinitum somehow without being ad nauseam. characters will say things they regret bc that’s who they are, people will do things without saying or thinking anything about it bc that’s how people work. i’m describing it so over-simplistically, but simple is far harder to do in prose, with so little to work with and/or rely on, than bombastic. yet everything here is so pitch perfect it has the illusion of effortlessness. it’s a great study on how execution is god, no matter how cliche or impossible to reconcile some of the context is. 

i guess i didn’t brace myself enough for how this reread will turn out to be, which is all on me considering it’s neither my first or second time reading it. maybe not even the third. there is just so much in so little, and all of it circles back to how much is threaded into each character. you can make a case for this being a story about gifted children burnout—but is it? gifted children suffer the repercussions of privileges and the burdens that come with it, and to a degree, the glass children all have that, but a lot of it come down to how too much awareness of the world too young prepares you for a lifetime of a degree of omniscience that will only fail you in a world walked most blissfully with ignorance. all the glass children are unequipped to live life not bc they’re brilliant but bc they can’t ignore how terrible the world is. how artificial everything out there is, how worthy of criticism even the most accomplished so-called poets and scholars in all these institutions are, how much better everything could be and therefore Should be. (

he had a theory, walt, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something god sicks on people who have the gall to accuse him of having created an ugly world

 was a particularly deranged line to deploy in its exact scene and context, but maybe that’s the “uncle wiggily in connecticut” enjoyer in me reacting.) 

seymour and buddy wanted to arm their youngest siblings with something different than the armor that had proved ineffective for them, but it had only ruined zooey and franny for life in the end. then there’s the impact that the nature of all the deaths and absences in the family had on them all, seymour’s chief among the list: buddy not giving up the phone he used to share with seymour and that being the vehicle zooey uses to finally connect with franny; franny quietly saying that she would like to talk to seymour even after being offered so many alternatives (including chicken soup described as “consecrated,” with the glass home positioned as the place of worship); zooey seeming to just be this tightly coiled ball of resentment about the childhood he didn’t get to have but still holding onto his sincere love for acting and his child’s mind image of seymour’s fat lady. 

until what point is a wise child a wise child? will they not, inevitably, grow up to be a wise adult too aware of how much there is in the world to see, such that this awareness isolates them from the rest of the population? when a child is validated in the problems they see in the world, who will teach them to find mindless beauty in it? who will teach them the necessity of useless simplicity in living a life that doesn’t feel too heavy to bear? who will teach them to close their eyes and turn away for now? who will tell them that knowledge isn’t always wisdom and wisdom isn’t always liberation? no one taught the glass children. they tried to teach each other. seymour tried so hard. it didn’t work. how could it have? you intellectualize so much of your life from so young that you have intellectualized it all into barely palatable pieces by the time your youth is over. 

(but this leads to a thought about how everything i learned about seymour here from franny and zooey’s perspective reframes 

 in a way i don’t want to process right now.) 

where franny’s attention is pulled to her brother’s hesitation, and buddy as the narrator notes that the other siblings like to notice it when zooey hesitates. that in fact, during zooey’s tenure on 

, he liked to pretend to hesitate, that he’d furrow his brows the way he saw the other children did to hide the fact that he wasn’t struggling to find an answer like they were. so many years later and he’s this restless, insatiable twenty-something, and him and franny both know they come across as pretentious, that they’re unfit to be with people satisfied with so little, that if they could, if it didn’t hurt them not to, they would just sit there and smile through all this greyness bc at least there will be none of this hollowness and loneliness and alienation. zooey sincerely believes he was offering franny good advice by giving her what he felt was a reality check, attacking her sincerity to bits bc just once he wants something to hold up under a barrage of interrogation so that he can acknowledge it to be true and good when it does. but the devastation that hits him when he realizes he’s only made franny more anguished, and the way that this is compared to unintentionally giving a cobra to a bunny-loving baby sister—sickening.

i would have been fine with it if the book ended on zooey’s failed attempt to console franny, but the last few pages gives me this monologue i’ve thought about off and on for years now but still felt like being flattened against a wall this time around: 

then as if that didn’t annihilate me enough, zooey confesses later, maybe unconvincingly, that 

and yes, all the world’s a stage and it’s terrible and some nights i myself can’t sleep at just how terrible but 

an artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection 

 and therein is the conflict that will be both comforting and haunting for the rest of his and franny’s lives—as well as my own.

maybe i’ll bump this down half a rating when i feel less unbalanced about it, but i’ve been waiting to feel less insane about it for a decade now and at this point i don’t want to keep playing hard to get bc even that is bias in itself. at least this time i have the facilities to know why exactly i feel like this, and not least of those reasons is how franny’s story takes place near exclusively inside one restaurant, while zooey’s unfolds in one single apartment, yet it just zips and zaps and zings so well that i can still feel my brain buzzing hours after i finished reading. there is so much attention here for sketching out the psyche through narration and body language and dialogue and setting, through what the narrative chooses to share and when, through the dynamic between internal maybe-truths and external affectations. and siblings. messed up, unequipped-for-the-world siblings. who in the end can never quite say they don’t have each other. 

the remaining part of me that has always hesitated to list this among my favourite books of all time reasoned that i never know how my teenage inclinations will hold up to my current ones—but now i do. i hate it. i love this book so much. i sincerely wish i was better than waving at all this and going #real but i’m just not. i really am just not. 

trying to write about this book feels like moses experiencing the burning bush then going home to leave mount sinai a yelp review and i’m furious about it

the thing about salinger is that i know i was/is/will likely always be a salinger-reared writer & a glass family enthusiast by heart, but i’m only self-aware about that bc i had a period of complete insanity in my teenage years about franny and zooey. very often, i think, as a teen, any story you feel a sense of kinship with feels like uncovering the secret to—whatever. the universe inside you or its closest counterpart. you feel seen by a story and that dual exchange seems proof that there is a world within you that can be contained by something that at the same time feels so infinite and expansive. then you grow up and you realize that this is just merely the mark of any good story, this feeling of connection and recognition made infinite. salinger has always been distinct to me in that, and i know i owe a lot to how generous he is in writing introspection and letting stories just be characters being people. 

i am at the same time aware that his characters aren’t exactly what one might consider traditionally likeable even in all their nuances and idiosyncrasies, and i was sure up until just before this particular reread that i was crazy over franny and zooey when i was younger precisely bc jaded precocious types are the sort of people you especially identify with when you’re young and pretentious about your youth and your perspective. which i very much was. however insufferable i can be now, i’d bet it was even worse in high school, before i learned to hold back and be more careful. so i figured it was a marker of what kind of book franny and zooey was that i felt so attached to it in those years. 

i was hoping i’ll reread franny and zooey now, poke at its thematic and stylistic features with objective curiosity, then move on more certain that i’ve outgrown the reader in me that salinger appealed to. i’m not keen on identifying as a Salinger Guy. i don’t want people to ask me what my favourite book is and for me to have to actually wearily admit it’s a novel by a white guy who i know questionably earned his place in the literary canon. so it feels as though, paradoxical as it is, i’m betraying some essential part of me when i say that this book felt like it was for me five times more than it already did before and for this reason alone i can’t even dock it half a star and that’s awful bc i’m not entirely sure i’m being rational right now. i won’t recommend franny and zooey to people per se, yet if there’s a book i love that i will allow to simplify who i am based on that one personality marker, it’s unfortunately this one.

more than anything, it’s maddening how much better it is when consumed with an (assumedly) more grown prefrontal cortex and not just a teenage, depression addled brain-heart liking it for the sake of feeling subconsciously known by it. blew me out of the park how much more layered franny and zooey is than i remember, how deftly it leaves some things understated even as it gives its characters all the room possible and more to feel like human beings. monologues will go on for paragraphs and paragraphs, descriptions of lived-in rooms will go on for pages and pages, the energy of a conversation will sustain itself ad infinitum somehow without being ad nauseam. characters will say things they regret bc that’s who they are, people will do things without saying or thinking anything about it bc that’s how people work. i’m describing it so over-simplistically, but simple is far harder to do in prose, with so little to work with and/or rely on, than bombastic. yet everything here is so pitch perfect it has the illusion of effortlessness. it’s a great study on how execution is god, no matter how cliche or impossible to reconcile some of the context is. 

i guess i didn’t brace myself enough for how this reread will turn out to be, which is all on me considering it’s neither my first or second time reading it. maybe not even the third. there is just so much in so little, and all of it circles back to how much is threaded into each character. you can make a case for this being a story about gifted children burnout—but is it? gifted children suffer the repercussions of privileges and the burdens that come with it, and to a degree, the glass children all have that, but a lot of it come down to how too much awareness of the world too young prepares you for a lifetime of a degree of omniscience that will only fail you in a world walked most blissfully with ignorance. all the glass children are unequipped to live life not bc they’re brilliant but bc they can’t ignore how terrible the world is. how artificial everything out there is, how worthy of criticism even the most accomplished so-called poets and scholars in all these institutions are, how much better everything could be and therefore Should be. (he had a theory, walt, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something god sicks on people who have the gall to accuse him of having created an ugly world was a particularly deranged line to deploy in its exact scene and context, but maybe that’s the “uncle wiggily in connecticut” enjoyer in me reacting.) 

seymour and buddy wanted to arm their youngest siblings with something different than the armor that had proved ineffective for them, but it had only ruined zooey and franny for life in the end. then there’s the impact that the nature of all the deaths and absences in the family had on them all, seymour’s chief among the list: buddy not giving up the phone he used to share with seymour and that being the vehicle zooey uses to finally connect with franny; franny quietly saying that she would like to talk to seymour even after being offered so many alternatives (including chicken soup described as “consecrated,” with the glass home positioned as the place of worship); zooey seeming to just be this tightly coiled ball of resentment about the childhood he didn’t get to have but still holding onto his sincere love for acting and his child’s mind image of seymour’s fat lady. 

until what point is a wise child a wise child? will they not, inevitably, grow up to be a wise adult too aware of how much there is in the world to see, such that this awareness isolates them from the rest of the population? when a child is validated in the problems they see in the world, who will teach them to find mindless beauty in it? who will teach them the necessity of useless simplicity in living a life that doesn’t feel too heavy to bear? who will teach them to close their eyes and turn away for now? who will tell them that knowledge isn’t always wisdom and wisdom isn’t always liberation? no one taught the glass children. they tried to teach each other. seymour tried so hard. it didn’t work. how could it have? you intellectualize so much of your life from so young that you have intellectualized it all into barely palatable pieces by the time your youth is over. 

(but this leads to a thought about how everything i learned about seymour here from franny and zooey’s perspective reframes a perfect day for bananafish in a way i don’t want to process right now.) 

there’s a section in zooey where franny’s attention is pulled to her brother’s hesitation, and buddy as the narrator notes that the other siblings like to notice it when zooey hesitates. that in fact, during zooey’s tenure on it’s a wise child, he liked to pretend to hesitate, that he’d furrow his brows the way he saw the other children did to hide the fact that he wasn’t struggling to find an answer like they were. so many years later and he’s this restless, insatiable twenty-something, and him and franny both know they come across as pretentious, that they’re unfit to be with people satisfied with so little, that if they could, if it didn’t hurt them not to, they would just sit there and smile through all this greyness bc at least there will be none of this hollowness and loneliness and alienation. zooey sincerely believes he was offering franny good advice by giving her what he felt was a reality check, attacking her sincerity to bits bc just once he wants something to hold up under a barrage of interrogation so that he can acknowledge it to be true and good when it does. but the devastation that hits him when he realizes he’s only made franny more anguished, and the way that this is compared to unintentionally giving a cobra to a bunny-loving baby sister—sickening.

i would have been fine with it if the book ended on zooey’s failed attempt to console franny, but the last few pages gives me this monologue i’ve thought about off and on for years now but still felt like being flattened against a wall this time around: 

You’d better get busy, though, buddy. The goddamn sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I’m talking about. You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddamn phenomenal world. [...] I used to worry about that. I don’t worry about it very much any more. At least I’m still in love with Yorick’s skull. At least I always have time enough to stay in love with Yorick’s skull.

then as if that didn’t annihilate me enough, zooey confesses later, maybe unconvincingly, that the world is full of idiots, and yes, all the world’s a stage and it’s terrible and some nights i myself can’t sleep at just how terrible but an artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection [...] on his own terms, not anyone else’s. and therein is the conflict that will be both comforting and haunting for the rest of his and franny’s lives—as well as my own.

maybe i’ll bump this down half a rating when i feel less unbalanced about it, but i’ve been waiting to feel less insane about it for a decade now and at this point i don’t want to keep playing hard to get bc even that is bias in itself. at least this time i have the facilities to know why exactly i feel like this, and not least of those reasons is how franny’s story takes place near exclusively inside one restaurant, while zooey’s unfolds in one single apartment, yet it just zips and zaps and zings so well that i can still feel my brain buzzing hours after i finished reading. there is so much attention here for sketching out the psyche through narration and body language and dialogue and setting, through what the narrative chooses to share and when, through the dynamic between internal maybe-truths and external affectations. and siblings. messed up, unequipped-for-the-world siblings. who in the end can never quite say they don’t have each other. 

the remaining part of me that has always hesitated to list this among my favourite books of all time reasoned that i never know how my teenage inclinations will hold up to my current ones—but now i do. i hate it. i love this book so much. i sincerely wish i was better than waving at all this and going #real but i’m just not. i really am just not. 

Nick Gracilla

Two short stories, really, that capture something of an east coast upper middle class malaise. The dialog with Mrs Glass is the funniest bit -- I couldn't help but hear Sederis' mother here. Fine reading if not very, remarkably distant from contemporary life.

Jasmine Stanway

“Everything everybody does is so- I don’t know- not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and- sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much only in a different way.”
- Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger
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Rating: 3.5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️✨
___
I needed a day to collect my thoughts on this book. It’s very different from anything I’ve read before. Franny Glass is a college student in the midst of a mental breakdown and clinging to a book with a religious narrative for some kind of perspective; meanwhile her brother Zooey is following suit due to his own personal issues with his acting career and their abnormal family of entertainers. Both are also still coming to terms with a terrible family tragedy that occurred when they were children, contributing greatly to their troubled minds. 

This book is rife with teen angst and all the complicated things young people feel when they’re disillusioned with life. There are some things that definitely went over my head, this being my first Salinger book, and I believe this is a story that requires a re read in order to grasp the full concept. That being said, the writing is sarcastic and funny, with just the right amount of existential dread thrown in, and it’s clear that Salinger really understood the minds of 50s-era teenagers. 

Overall, I believe I will read this again one day, and I’m super happy to knock this off my Gilmore Girls reading list!

Jacqui Siroia

I really loved this book. I had never read it before and actually had a woman stop me on the subway and ask me if it’s worth revisiting since she hadn’t read it since high school. My answer is yes. I found the first three quarters of this book to hold up well. The characters are older than Holden from Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ so their maturity (or lack thereof) has deeper roots. I loved reading the Franny story as it was capturing a young woman’s mental breakdown. I felt myself identifying to that character and understanding her perspective more than I have experienced in recent years. It was powerful to be able to assimilate with a character who is going through similar challenges that I am but in the 50’s. It’s reassuring to know that these challenges are not new and that Salinger was depicting these people like this so many decades ago.

Franny Glass is a pretty, effervescent college student on a date with her intellectually confident boyfriend, Lane. They appear to be the perfect couple, but as they struggle to communicate with each other about the things they really care about, slowly their true feelings come to the surface. The second story in this book, 'Zooey', plunges us into the world of her ethereal, sophisticated family. When Franny's emotional and spiritual doubts reach new heights, her older brother Zooey, a misanthropic former child genius, offers her consolation and brotherly advice. Written in Salinger's typically irreverent style, these two stories offer a touching snapshot of the distraught mindset of early adulthood and are full of the insightful emotional observations and witty turns of phrase that have helped make Salinger's reputation what it is today.

Alice Myles

azriel

I loved it so much! I think it's more nuanced than The Catcher in The Rye, also by Salinger. I loved the concept of the Jesus Prayer and I loved the way the characters were portrayed.

Beth

i, for the most part, enjoyed this book! i liked how it read like a play and i enjoyed the characters, however… it took me a while to read and i kept getting kinda bored because i felt like there were a lot of words but nothing was actually happening.

i would like ten franny and zooey sequels, ty. 🤍

Franny and Zooey

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