Franny and Zooey is a novel by J. D. Salinger, who is most famous for his earlier work, called The Catcher in the Rye. It consists of two parts, Franny and Zooey; each was originally published separately in The New Yorker in the late 1950s, but they were always intended as one novel, as they were published in 1961.
The novel's most attractive quality is its humorous tone: self-conscious, over-sophisticated, and supercilious. On the very first page, Salinger describes the voices of a group of college boys at a railway station, waiting for their dates to arrive for a big week-end, as "collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue…" How well I remember boys like that!
The set-up has multiple layers of artifice, as though the narrator were hiding his true meaning, and his true personality. The narrator, Buddy, presents himself as an unqualified teacher of literature in a small girls' college in the ski country of New England, who is also trying to build a career as a writer of fiction. Buddy claims he got the story from the main characters themselves—Franny and Zooey and their mother Bessie—in long, detailed conversations and letters.
Dialog dominates the narrative to such an extent that it would be easy to stage the scenes as a play. The number of locations is minimal and there is very little action. Franny has scenes in a railway station, taxi, and restaurant, but Zooey mainly takes place in a bathroom—while Zooey is sitting in the tub, hidden behind a shower curtain— and a few other locations around the house. The action is so static that it would be easy to transform the novel into a series of radio plays.
We first meet Franny in a letter she has written to her boyfriend Lane. She is painfully self-conscious, apologizing in advance for her scattered thinking and bad spelling, as English majors are wont to do. After Franny arrives for the week-end, the pair have lunch at a fancy restaurant. Lane is also self-conscious, in a self-important way, wanting to look right and act right, and to have everything go right, according to his conventional pre-conceptions. Franny and Lane long to be in love with each other, but each criticizes the other constantly, and their hypocrisy breaks through appearances in comical ways. Describing Franny's internal life, Salinger says, "Sometimes it was hell to conceal her impatience over the male of the species' general ineptness, and Lane's in particular."
Franny veers back and forth between playing her role of giddy, gushing college girl and expressing her true feelings of doubt and disgust. For instance, she forces herself to listen to Lane's discourse with a "special semblance of absorption," and then totally condemns his speaking style and his self-presentation. She feels completely detached from Lane, but she covers it with an affectionate gesture.
Franny is suffering from total disillusionment with social conventions and conformity, with phoniness and self-promotion. Her way of life—majoring in English and acting in summer stock—seems embarrassingly ego-driven. She finds herself drawn to mysticism and prayer—in particular the so-called Jesus prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner." The conflict between her desire to conform and her spiritual inclinations finally causes Franny to faint in the midst of lunch with Lane. This gives her an escape, and an excuse to go home and languish on the couch, where Zooey starts.
Buddy interrupts his story at this point to give us the basics of Franny's improbable family background. Her parents, Bessie and Les, had been a popular vaudeville act, and all seven of their children had been youthful brainiacs, who performed on a radio quiz show for kids. To make it weirder, the two oldest boys indoctrinated their younger siblings in spirituality in general and Buddhism in particular from the beginning.
We first meet Zooey in that most intimate of activities, the long hot bath. His expectation of privacy, is frustrated by the entrance of his mother, Bessie. The fact that Bessie intrudes on his privacy tells us a lot about her character, and the fact that he lets her, with grudging good humor, tells us a lot about their relationship. Bessie is a genuine comic character, appearing in a hair net and a kimono whose pockets are so overloaded with paraphernalia that she "clinks faintly when she walks." She is worried about Franny's depression and wants Zooey to get her to snap out of it.
Zooey is a hidden character. When he finally emerges from behind the shower curtain, he quickly hides his face by lathering for a shave. When he tries to help Franny recover, he spends most of the time lying on the floor with his face hidden from her. When that doesn't work, he talks to Franny over the phone, pretending to be their brother, Buddy, who purports to be the author of this story. Zooey's personality is a contradiction in terms. He is extraordinarily handsome; he has astounding recall of everything he reads; his voice is naturally sonorous. In fact, he has quite naturally become a sought-after television actor, with additional roles on stage or in some independent film. The unexpected contradiction is that he has been fighting a private war against narcissism since he was seven or eight years old; he tries not to look at himself in mirrors, the way Narcissus of myth doted on his own image reflected in a pool. Zooey has already been through the sort of spiritual crisis Franny is experiencing, and he has been re-reading a letter that Buddy wrote to him at the time, looking for inspiration to share with Franny.
In Franny and Zooey, Salinger sought to express a spiritual synthesis of the highest order. He considered how a naturally creative performer can escape their ego and live consistently with their spiritual beliefs. His solution is both amusing and liberating.
