I’d been meaning to read Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger for a really long time now. I read the first 20 pages back in December but it fell behind my bed, and it’s a really small book, so I kind of forgot about it until I cleaned my room the other week. I wish now I had read it earlier; like Salinger’s other books he packs an incredible amount of meaning into a short amount of space.
Franny and Zooey consists of a short story entitled “Franny” followed by a novella called Zooey. Both pieces were originally published in The New Yorker in the 1950s and were then published together as a novel in 1961. Both stories follow the Glass family, who appears frequently in Salinger’s works. There are seven children in the Glass family and all were child stars on a radio show that highlighted their wit and intelligence.
Franny is the youngest of the Glass children and Zooey is the second youngest child and youngest boy of the family. The short story “Franny” follows a date Franny has prior to “the Yale game” and the novella Zooey follows the story of Zooey caring for his sister after she has a “spiritual breakdown” (as described by John Updike in his 1961 review of the book in The New Yorker.)
There are multiple pages I have dog-eared and lines that are highlighted that just resonated with me and I’m sure they are the same lines that have made it a classic work. Essentially, Salinger just wrote about a series of conversations and made them into an enticing philosophical work. It’s one of those books that I doubt will ever be a movie, just because its literary significance could never be portrayed accurately through any means besides the written word.
My absolute favorite book of all time is The Catcher in the Rye (the novel that Salinger is most known for) and I am confident in saying that Franny and Zooey matches it in excellence. It only further verified for me that Salinger may in fact be the best writer of the 20th century.
