Franny And Zooey: The Anti Review
by Sarah Mathews and Shiraz Noor
Sarah: I remember picking up a copy of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In the Rye at twelve or thirteen. I’m pretty sure that it was one of the first books that really spoke to me. Quite literally. It was as if Holden Caulfield was speaking right to me through the pages; with an anger and sense of disillusionment that mirrored my own, without any pretentiousness or phoniness—and it blew me away .
Shiraz: Yeah, well, it was only one of the most influential portrayals of teenage angst ever. It’s got universal appeal, buddy. We’re all Holden—
Sarah: At some point in our lives. C’est vrai. Well, Catcher remains Salinger’s most widely read novel. It’s certainly the most accessible. Sometimes unfairly overlooked is J.D’s other great work, Franny and Zooey, which can be considered the sequel to Catcher in terms of maturity and style.
Shiraz: Yeah, I’m sure it spoke to you too. Quite literally. Move over, it’s my turn to get all David Copperfield on ya. So. I remember picking up a copy of J.D Salinger’s Franny and Zooey a few weeks ago. Because Sarah here had been telling me to read it for months, saying that the two main characters reminded her of the two of us.
Sarah: I’d always thought of myself as Franny, because she’s sorta amiable but neurotic and gets really frustrated with herself, other people and the way things are in the world. Although, just like Catcher, the characters are pretty universal and most people can see a little of themselves in them. So, Shiraz IMed me, saying something like,
“SO I’M READING FRANNY AND ZOOEY RIGHT NOW whoops capslock, sorry
you’re so right about them being us that i propose we change our facebook names accordingly”
Shiraz: Haha, yeah. The two of us were the Glass siblings on Facebook for a while. Actually, I think I still have my name set to Zooey Glass…
Sarah: It was pretty epic while it lasted. We even talked like the characters; incidentally, Shiraz’s overuse of “buddy” and “Chrissakes” is residual Zooey. I got tired of people asking me about my name-change, though. After a slew of messages like “Franny Glass!!!?? wth” and “Lol, Franny Glass? Sounds like a tranny hooker, no offense”, I reverted to my actual name.
Shiraz: COPOUT.
Sarah: Pshhhh. You only like being Zooey because it gives you an excuse to act all aggressive and wise. And call everyone “buddy” and make it sound insufferably patronizing.
Shiraz: Hey, hey, play nice. I think we’ve digressed considerably. Back to the book, yeah?
Sarah: Sure thing. Let’s try to convey plot details without a ton of spoilers. So…Franny and Zooey Glass, 20 and 25 respectively, are the youngest siblings of the wickedly amusing, totally eccentric Glass family. In the first part Franny Glass gets off a train to meet her Yale boyfriend, who is very collegiate, ambitious and pretentious. We notice that she seems very perturbed and on-edge. She talks venomously about the life she leads and the superficiality of the people around her, her friends, fellow students and professors.
“He’s on lend-lease or something from Oxford, and he’s just a terrible sad old self-satisfied phony with wild and wooly white hair. I think he goes into the men’s room and musses it up before he comes to class- I honestly do. He has no enthusiasm whatever for his subject. Ego, yes. Enthusiasm, no.”
In Catcher, Holden was disillusioned by the world, by the “phoniness” he saw everywhere. Franny calls it “ego” and takes a step further than Holden, in recognizing it in herself as well. In Franny’s case, disillusionment escalates into utter nausea, at life, at people in general, at herself. By the end of the first part, she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Shiraz: And then Zooey makes his entrance. Actually, it’s more like his mother Bessie makes her entrance, barging in on him while he’s sitting in a bathtub. The scene where Bessie is talking to him while he’s getting out of the tub is outrageously prolonged. Then, to the reader’s utter amusement, she returns five minutes later for another extensive discourse with Zooey as he’s shaving. Zooey’s rampant irritation at her presence, and the subsequent immediate regret about ostracizing her, is completely hilarious, and rather touching. It’s the way the book is written which makes it such a masterpiece—arguably J.D.’s finest piece of work. Scenes that should have been done with long ago continue until the situation simply becomes droll.
Sarah: To put it simply, Bessie wants Zooey to get the hell out of the tub and go see to his sister, who’s having a nervous breakdown on their living room couch, muttering a prayer she picked up from a book. Bessie is also deeply concerned that Franny vehemently refuses the chicken soup that she keeps pressing on her. Zooey’s general reaction to this can pretty much be summed as, “Goddam, buddy, what in hell do you expect me to do? Go feed her chicken soup, for Chrissakes?” He does go see her, though and they have an extremely long, often absurd, often profound conversation about love, ego, other people, Jesus, the religious life, their family, mysticism and phoniness, to name a few. The book ends with a remarkable, brilliantly simple insight Zooey gives to Franny. Franny lies back on the couch, in silence, and smiles.
Shiraz: Hmm. That it?
Sarah: I don’t know. Plot, we’ve sort of covered, but I don’t think we’ve really addressed the fundamental question from a reader’s point of view. “Should I read this book? Colluding in killing trees and spending money I could use to score some chicks? And if so, why? Who reads now, anyways?”
Shiraz: Score some chicks? You kill me, buddy. Why read the book? Because it was great. Salinger was a brilliant writer, for all the wrong reasons. Having mastered the art of being artless, his use of repetition and anti-climax in particular drilled home the kind of sheer stupid brilliance rarely seen anymore in today’s Harry Potter era. We can forgive him for disappearing off the face of the earth at the height of his popularity. The reason? Half a century later, his words and, indeed, his wit, still resonate with young people everywhere just beginning to understand the phoniness of the world around them, proving once and for all that the predicaments of his characters, are timeless. Franny and Zooey definitely has relevance to our present time. As we’ve attempted to demonstrate, in this conversation.
Sarah: And it’s hilarious. Completely. I’m not much of a laugh-out-loud person when reading and this book had me in stitches. The characters are so funny and absurd, but as real as you or me. Franny and Zooey was a revelation for me; I’d explain why, but that would give away too much . I’ll just say that it had the best freakin’ ending ever. I loved it. I’m sure most people will.
Shiraz: I wonder if we convinced anyone to give it a read. We sorta did get caught up in the banter.
Sarah: Dear readers. Look. It’s an $8 book we’re talking about. Buy it. Or pay a visit to the library. You won’t be sorry.
Shiraz: Amen to that, buddy. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to continue pretending I’m Zooey Glass, for Chrissakes.
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