To get straight to the worst, what I’m about to offer isn’t really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie, and those who have seen the footage have strongly advised me against nurturing any elaborate distribution plans for it.
For anyone who, like me, thought that Franny and Zooey was a story about two girls (I thought they were friends), we were wrong. Zooey, is in fact a boy, and this is the story about a brother and sister.
The story starts with Franny, the youngest Glass. The Glass children are all exceptionally bright in a child-genius-quiz-show kind of way, something Franny struggles to come to terms with in college. Upon her return home on the cusp (or heels) of a nervous breakdown, most of the story revolves around Zooey’s conversation with his mother, Bessie, or his talks with Franny to “help” her out her slump, all of which is narrated by his older brother Buddy.
The narration isn’t consistent, but I must admit I kind of liked that. I enjoyed getting a taste of third-person and first-person narrations, seeing the story from an outside perspective as well as the stream-of-conscious narrations Salinger is known for. Rather than follow a traditional plot, the reader gets a snapshot of a particular moment in time and I appreciated the variety.
A little fun fact I realized upon looking up the title – apparently “Franny” was published as a short story in the New Yorker (1955) and “Zooey” was published by the same publication, but as a novella (1957). They were published together as a book in 1961. Discovering the origin of the story gave a bit more insight (and potentially patience) into the structure of the book, which only had two defined chapters. I struggled with the absence of chapter breaks, which made it hard to put down and pick back up later without feeling jolted in the story.
That aside, I enjoyed the mental journey of Franny and Zooey wrestling with family dynamics and tragedies, grappling with their own particular intellectual fortitude, and the complexities of growing up. Although different than I anticipated when starting it, I enjoyed the novel: precocious brainiacs and all.
Personal rating: 6.5/10
Recommend? If the above review intrigued you, then yes
Re-read? Maybe
Time: 1:49
Bonus Content
My favorite line, one that took me immediately back to my undergraduate campus and socratic seminars, is as follows:
The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.