Franny and Zooey
by J. D. Salinger
Summary
The book collects two connected stories about the Glass family that Salinger had already published separately in The New Yorker. In Franny, the youngest Glass child arrives for a weekend visit with her boyfriend Lane Coutell and, over lunch, unravels in front of him, overwhelmed by what she experiences as the emptiness and performance in everyone around her, including herself; she has been reading The Way of a Pilgrim, a book about praying the Jesus Prayer without ceasing, and the story ends with her silently repeating it at the restaurant table, on the edge of a breakdown Lane cannot begin to understand. Zooey picks up shortly after, back at the Glass family's cramped Manhattan apartment, where Franny's older brother Zooey, an actor still living at home, tries and repeatedly fails to talk her out of her spiritual crisis. His real breakthrough comes only when he calls her on the phone pretending to be their oldest brother Buddy, using memories of their late brother Seymour, who died by suicide years earlier, to talk Franny back from despair without ever admitting the deception.
Salinger writes almost entirely in extended, digressive dialogue, and very little happens in either story in terms of plot; the drama is all interior, carried by how much a reader comes to know Franny and Zooey through what they say to avoid saying what they mean. It reads slowly for its length and asks real patience of a reader waiting for a scene to resolve into something, though the emotional payoff, when Zooey's ruse finally lands, earns the wait for readers who stay with it.
Little, Brown and Company published the two stories together as a single volume in 1961, six years after Franny had first appeared in The New Yorker in 1955 and four years after Zooey followed in 1957.
Historical Context & Significance
Franny and Zooey was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award for fiction, part of the same crowded field that lost to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer alongside Catch-22 and Revolutionary Road, three books later far better remembered than the one that beat them. The novel spent twenty six weeks atop the New York Times fiction bestseller list through 1961 and 1962, a commercial success the award did not follow.
Critics divided sharply over what that success meant. John Updike admired how the Glass family's voices melted together into what he called an impossible radiance, while the critic Maxwell Geismar called it an appallingly bad story and George Steiner dismissed the whole book as shapeless self indulgence; decades later the novelist Jay McInerney was still complaining about the self satisfaction of the Glass family as a subject. Salinger made only minor revisions to the text after learning some readers had mistakenly concluded that Franny was pregnant rather than in spiritual crisis, and the book has remained continuously in print since 1961, outlasting both its early detractors and the award it did not win.