reviews
pmiller@memphisonline.com
Thu, 16 Oct 1997 10:19:35 -0500
Ive read some reviews recently written at the time of the publishing of
Salingers book Franny & Zooey. I had to wonder did they read the same
book that I did? Why is it that authors, like John Updike, who have
never written a book as good as F&Z, feel so free to critic with a
negative flair?
Maybe trying to poke holes in Salingers work makes them feel elevated
above the great writer. Maybe because F&Z seems to have a
quasi-religious message in parts of the book, and they being so safely
secular, resist that in a work of literature.
Yes I do support the right of a reviewer to say what they will, just
venting steam really. Below is the review by John Updike for anyone
interested.
Paul
September 17, 1961: 'Franny and Zooey' by J. D. Salinger
Quite suddenly, as things go in the middle period of J. D.
Salinger, his
later, longer stories are descending from the clouds of old New
Yorkers
and assuming incarnations between hard covers. ''Raise High the
Roof
Beam, Carpenters,'' became available last year in ''Stories From
the
New Yorker 1950-1960,'' and now ''Franny'' and ''Zooey'' have a
book
to themselves. These two stories -- the first medium-short, the
second
novella-length -- are contiguous in time, and have as their
common
subject Franny's spiritual crisis.
Text:
In the first story, she arrives by train from a Smith-like
college to
spend the week-end of the Yale game at what must be Princeton.
She
and her date, Lane Coutell, go to a restaurant where it develops
that she
is not only unenthusiastic but downright ill. She attempts to
explain
herself while her friend brags about a superbly obnoxious term
paper
and eats frogs' legs. Finally, she faints, and is last seen
lying in the
manager's office silently praying at the ceiling.
In the second story, Franny has returned to her home, a large
apartment
in the East Seventies. It is the Monday following her unhappy
Saturday.
Only Franny's mother, Bessie, and her youngest brother, Zooey,
are
home. While Franny lies sleeplessly on the living-room sofa, her
mother
communicates, in an interminably rendered conversation, her
concern and
affection to Zooey, who then, after an even longer conversation
with
Franny, manages to gather from the haunted atmosphere of the
apartment the crucial word of consolation. Franny, ''as if all
of what
little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly
hers,'' smiles
at the ceiling and falls asleep.
Few writers since Joyce would risk such a wealth of words upon
events
that are purely internal and deeds that are purely talk. We live
in a
world, however, where the decisive deed may invite the
holocaust, and
Salinger's conviction that our inner lives greatly matter
peculiarly
qualifies him to sing of an America where, for most of us, there
seems
little to do but to feel. Introversion, perhaps, has been forced
upon
history; an age of nuance, of ambiguous gestures and
psychological
jockeying on a national and private scale, is upon us, and
Salinger's
intense attention to gesture and intonation help make him, among
his
contemporaries, a uniquely relevant literary artist. His
fiction, in its
rather grim bravado, its humor, its morbidity, its wry but
persistent
hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present American
life. It
pays the price, however, of becoming dangerously convoluted and
static.
A sense of composition is not among Salinger's strengths, and
even these
two stories, so apparently complementary, distinctly jangle as
components of one book.
The Franny of ''Franny'' and the Franny of ''Zooey'' are not the
same
person. The heroine of ''Franny'' is a pretty college girl
passing through
a plausible moment of disgust. She has discovered -- one feels
rather
recently -- a certain ugliness in the hungry human ego and a
certain
fatuity in her college environment. She is attempting to find
her way out
with the help of a religious book, ''The Way of a Pilgrim,''
which was
mentioned by a professor. She got the book out of the college
library.
Her family, glimpsed briefly in the P.S. of a letter she has
written,
appear to be standard upper-middle gentry. Their name is nowhere
given
as Glass; Franny never mentions any brothers.
The Franny of ''Zooey,'' on the other hand, is Franny Glass, the
youngest
of the seven famous Glass children, all of whom have been in
turn
wondrously brilliant performers on a radio quiz program, ''It's
a Wise
Child.'' Their parents, a distinctly unstandard combination of
Jewish and
Irish, are an old vaudeville team. From infancy on, Franny has
been
saturated by her two oldest brothers, Seymour and Buddy, in the
religious wisdom of the East. ''The Way of a Pilgrim,'' far from
being
newly encountered at college, comes from Seymour's desk, where
it has
been for years.
One wonders how a girl raised in a home where Buddhism and
crisis
theology were table talk could have postponed her own crisis so
long and,
when it came, be so disarmed by it. At any rate, there is no
question of
her being pregnant; the very idea seems a violation of the
awesome Glass
ethereality.
The more Salinger writes about them, the more the seven Glass
children
melt indistinguishably together in an impossible radiance of
personal
beauty and intelligence. Franny is described thus: ''Her skin
was lovely,
and her features were delicate and most distinctive. Her eyes
were
very nearly the same quite astonishing shade of blue as Zooey's
but
were set farther apart, as a sister's eyes no doubt should be.''
Of
Zooey, we are assured he has a ''somewhat preposterous ability
to
quote, instantaneously and, usually, verbatim, almost anything
he had ever
read, or even listened to, with genuine interest.'' The purpose
of such
sentences is surely not to particularize imaginary people but to
instill in
the reader a mood of blind worship, tinged with envy.
''Franny'' takes place in what is recognizably our world; in
''Zooey'' we
move into a dream world whose zealously animated details only
emphasize an essential unreality. When Zooey says to Franny,
''Yes, I
have an ulcer, for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron
Age,''
disbelief falls on the ''buddy'' as much as on ''Kaliyuga,'' and
the
explanatory ''the Iron Age'' clinches our suspicion that a
lecturer has
usurped the writing stand. Not the least dismaying development
of the
Glass stories is the vehement editorializing on the obvious --
television
scripts are not generally good, not all section men are
geniuses. Of
course, the Glasses condemn the world only to condescend to it,
to
forgive it, in the end. Yet the pettishness of the condemnation
diminishes
the gallantry of the condescension.
Perhaps these are hard words; they are made hard to write by the
extravagant self-consciousness of Salinger's later prose,
wherein most
of the objections one might raise are already raised. On the
flap of this
book jacket, he confesses, ''There is a real-enough danger, I
suppose,
that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely,
in my own
methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I'm
very
hopeful.'' Let me say, I am glad he is hopeful. I am one of
those -- to do
some confessing of my own -- for whom Salinger's work dawned as
something of a revelation. I expect that further revelations are
to come.
The Glass saga, as he has sketched it out, potentially contains
great
fiction. When all reservations have been entered, in the
correctly
unctuous and apprehensive tone, about the direction he has
taken, it
remains to acknowledge that it is a direction, and 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.
Home | The New York Times Book Review | Search | Forums |
Help
The New York Times on the Web
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company