Zooey rediscovered
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Sun, 18 Jan 1998 13:12:43 +0000
My copy of Franny & Zooey is dated 1962. There are one or
two stains left by people to whom I - possibly misguidedly -
lent the book over the years. But I hadn't actually opened it
myself for at least two decades. Finding myself nowadays with
so many new friends on Bananafish I thought I'd better polish up
the old lens. So I read Zooey again last night.
It was a bit like opening the freezer & discovering that at some
time in the past there'd been an unannounced power failure.
Quite large chunks of the meat had begun to rot.
I'd always had thought of Salinger's style (though not in
The Catcher) as containing a big element of "New Yorker"
dandyism. But in Zooey the curlicues, the hyperexactness,
the look-at-me-I'm-going-for-the-unexpected-but-juste-mot give
a terrible feeling of archness. When the narrator mocks his
own familial weakness for long windedness, you suspect he's
putting in a pre-emptive strike to forestall criticism.
The dialogue clunks. Bessie - addressing her children as
`young man' or `young lady' - speaks like Fay Bainter in an
Andy Hardy movie. (The tool kit in the house coat doesn't save
her from being the stereotypical Jewish Mother - even down to
the chicken soup.) And the tone of insulting affection with which
Zooey abuses her becomes dreadfully laboured after many a long
page. And aren't the exchanges with Franny just a bit expository ?
Although already far too old when I first read the story, I'm sure
part of the attractiveness I found in the whole Glass cycle was the
temptation to identify with this tremendously gifted, tremendously
beautiful, tremendously aware, tremendously tough-minded bunch
of young people. But now, they just sound precious.
If you're going to write about the redemption of the soul I don't
think it's humanly possible to do so with any conviction whilst
setting your story in the Upper East Side. The stews of
St Petersburgh perhaps, or a carpenter's shop in Galilee, or
the Gulag Archipelago. But who'd really want a painting of
the Resurrection by Warhol ?
In the Fifties, Oriental philosophy was all the rage. Oppenheimer
watched his bomb going off & quoted the Upanishads to himself.
As undergraduates, we read Gerald Heard & Aldous Huxley & spent
endless hours discussing the freedom of the Unattached Man -
all the while slurping down oysters & Guinness in some of the finest
bars in Dublin. As I remember, we were every bit as sensitive &
dedicated as the Glass children. And although one or two of us
did also manage to contrive our own deaths most of us simply
grew up.
Scottie B.