by Riley Atzert
Photo by Dominika Poláková
J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey was originally published as two sister stories in The New Yorker. Riddled with Salinger’s usual charm and irreverent voice, this story collection makes for a quick and engrossing read.
The Plot
Both series are tied together. “Zooey” picks up where “Franny” left off. These stories center around the youngest siblings in the Glass family, a fictional family recurring in many of Salinger’s works. Like the name suggests, Salinger spends these pages covering the emotional strife of Franny and Zooey, two cerebral, sardonic, and overwhelmed individuals.
“Franny” begins with the titular character visiting her boyfriend Lance at university ahead of an important football game. Their time together is spent in a small restaurant, where they sip martinis and discuss their time at school as Franny’s external shell begins to crack. She falls fast from her safe status as the fresh-faced intellectual to a woman overwrought with revulsion for the phony and egotistical. In typical Salinger style, Franny’s judgmental attitude causes her to fail in school. She drops out of theater because she’s afraid of being a self-important robot who roams the streets in search of validation.
In ‘Zooey,’ Salinger follows Franny’s brother Zooey as he quarrels with his debilitated sister and weary mother. The magic of these two stories lies in characterization. The Glass family members are wildly erudite, with most of their problems stemming from their own respective psyches. The dialogue between the family members is overflowing with searing wit and exhausting intellectualism as they analyze the human condition.
The Consensus
Filled with chain-smoking, well-dressed characters, bathtubs, and the Salinger aesthetic, Franny and Zooey is a refreshing read. Salinger tackles collegiate worries with grace and accuracy, all tightly wrapped in scintillating prose.
This invigorating collection of pages will leave you feeling warm, appreciative, and in admiration of all aspects of literature and humanity. It is an exhaustive dive into judgment and the lives we lead in a world that is so much bigger than the individual.
Riley is from Jacksonville, Florida. She is a student studying Editing, Writing and Media at Florida State University with a minor in Psychology. She works as an editorial assistant for the fiction section of Kudzu. In her free time, Riley enjoys binge-watching television, reading, drinking Shirley Temples and falling asleep on the floor.
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