Franny and Zooey
Since I wrote about New Haven a few weeks ago, my mind’s been ricocheting between two places – the college town I loved living in, and the metropolis I currently call home. So I decided to let my state of mind guide my reading material, and picked up J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey.
Franny and Zooey was originally published as two separate short stories in The New Yorker. Franny, set in New Haven, debuted in 1955. Zooey, meanwhile, came out two years later and was located in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The story’s titular characters are the youngest of seven siblings in the Glass family. As ultra-precocious children, each of them starred in It’s a Wise Child, a radio show of their parents’ invention that traded on each child’s preternatural charm and brilliance. Later, as adults, most of the seven struggled, succumbing to nervous breakdowns, misanthropy, obscurity, and even suicide. Franny and Zooey (the book, not the people) is basically a snapshot of what those struggles look like for the babies of the Glass family now that they’re in their 20s. It’s also the most Seinfeld-y book I’ve ever read, in the sense that it manages to be fascinating in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that very little actually happens.
So what does happen? In the first story, college student Franny takes the Metro-North to New Haven for the Harvard-Yale game, where she withers under the gaze of her bland boyfriend Lane. Over lunch, he eats snails while she self-destructs, unable to stop thinking about how shallow and inauthentic the world she moves through has become. After escaping to the bathroom for several crying jags, she eventually passes out. That’s it.
And yet, I loved this story. In many ways, I felt a lot like Franny a decade or so ago – sitting across restaurant tables in New York and New Haven trying to feign rapt interest in someone I didn’t even like all that much. Shaping and accommodating myself to others and hating myself for it. Talking past the people in my life. Looking at the boys I dated through squinted eyes, trying in vain to focus on their good qualities. Finding myself saying and doing things that felt false without knowing why. Franny’s story is, in addition to being a meditation on relationships gone sour, the story of girl trying to figure out who she is, and getting hopelessly lost along the way.
It’s also a goldmine of odd, angst-filled, coming-of-age language – Salingerisms not unlike the sort of things I used to write in my journals:
“I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
“He remembered that once, in a borrowed car, after kissing Franny for a half hour or so, he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself.”
“Lane knew Sorenson only slightly but had a vague, categorical aversion to his face and manner.”
“She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car.”
”’Oh, it’s lovely to see you!’ Franny said as the cab moved off. “I’ve missed you.” The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn’t mean them at all. Again with guilt, she took Lane’s hand and tightly, warmly laced fingers with him.”
The second, and much longer, story is named for Zooey, an actor with a burgeoning career and a case of ulcer-causing impatience and irritability. The story is set entirely in Zooey’s parents’ faded east side apartment, where he still lives at age 25. Zooey takes a bath, spars with his mother, steps into the time-capsule room of his dead brother, and critiques his sister Franny’s “tenth-rate self-pity.” Again, that’s it.
Yet, as with Franny, there’s magic in the details of this story. In the fascinating description of the Glass bathroom cabinet, a precursor to today’s “shelfies.” In the sweet ineptitude of Mr. Glass, wondering aloud whether Franny might like a tangerine when she’s in the middle of a nervous breakdown. In the random non-sequiturs of Bessie Glass, responding to her son’s violent outburst by musing “I wish you’d get married.” I thrilled at the verbal sparring, at the meandering monologues, at Zooey describing himself, his sister, and his siblings, saying: “We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound.”
This book’s a breeze – a 200-page read you could take down in an idle afternoon. It’s also strangely beautiful – the sort of writing that makes you reflect on the way we treat each other, on happiness, on obligation, and on who we grow up to become. So take an afternoon you were going to spend watching Seinfeld re-runs, and give it to Salinger instead.