It pays the price, however, of becoming dangerously convoluted and static. 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. In motion, Salinger seeks the words for things transmuted into human subjectivity. 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. Introversion, perhaps, has been forced upon history an age of nuance, of ambiguous gestures and psychological Lives greatly matter peculiarly qualifies him to sing of an America where, for most of us, there seems little to do but to feel. We live in a world, however, where the decisive deed may invite the holocaust, and Salinger's conviction that our inner 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.įew writers since Joyce would risk such a wealth of words upon events that are purely internal and deeds that are purely talk. 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 theĪpartment the crucial word of consolation. Only Franny's mother, Bessie, and her youngest brother, Zooey, are home. It is the Monday following her unhappy Saturday. In the second story, Franny has returned to her home, a large apartment in the East Seventies. Finally, she faints, and is last seen lying in the manager's office silently praying at the ceiling. She attempts to explain herself while her friend brags about a superbly obnoxious term paper and eats frogs' legs. She and her date, Lane Coutell, go to a restaurant where it develops that she is not only unenthusiastic but downright 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. 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. '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

Salinger, his later, longer stories are descending from the clouds of old New YorkersĪnd assuming incarnations between hard covers. Uite suddenly, as things go in the middle period of J. SeptemAnxious Days For The Glass Family By JOHN UPDIKE

Franny e zooey salinger