Thinking about Franny and Zooey . . .
Posted by Erin Brown in authors on February 2, 2010
My copy of Franny and Zooey is a 1961 Little, Brown hardback (fifth printing, mind you), stamped “discarded” and sold to me for less than a dollar by the Missoula Public Library. Still covered in protective cellophane, the dust jacket contains this note from the author about the project he had undertaken:
Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I’m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill . . . I have a great deal of thoroughly unscheduled material on paper . . . but I expect to be fussing with it . . . for some time to come . . . I work like greased lightning, myself, but my alter-ego and collaborator, Buddy Glass, is insufferably slow.
As a writer, I am inspired by the intimacy of Salinger’s relationship with the fictional Glass family, by his own particular immersion in the character of Buddy, and by the notion of his having found (or received, somehow, finally) his true material. As a reader, Franny and Zooey is brilliant to me in its portrait of the profound loyalty and understanding that exists between siblings who share “the exact same goddam freakish upbringing,” as Zooey says. I consider the long scene where Zooey is smoking in the bathtub and talking to his mother as one of the most wonderful I’ve read. But I’m by no means a Salinger buff, and I was unaware (before reading the New York Times obituary) of the critical disdain that greeted the book at the time of its publication. Apparently many—from Joan Didion to John Updike—found the Glass children insufferable and excoriated Salinger for what they saw as his self-indulgent and over-wrought devotion to them.
Janet Malcolm details and refutes these criticisms in her excellent article “Justice to Salinger” (New York Review of Books, 2001), claiming that critical antipathy toward the Glass characters in fact signals the genius of Salinger’s creations. Here’s an excerpt:
Throughout the Glass stories—as well as in Catcher—Salinger presents his abnormal heroes in the context of the normal world’s dislike and fear of them. These works are fables of otherness—versions of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” However, Salinger’s design is not as easy to make out as Kafka’s. His Gregor Samsas are not overtly disgusting and threatening; they have retained their human shape and speech and are even, in the case of Franny and Zooey, preternaturally good-looking. Nor is his vision unrelentingly tragic; it characteristically oscillates between the tragic and the comic. But with the possible exception of the older daughter, Boo Boo, who grew up to become a suburban wife and mother, none of the Glass children is able to live comfortably in the world. They are out of place. They might as well be large insects. The critics’ aversion points us toward their underlying freakishness, and toward Salinger’s own literary deviance and irony.
If you’re a fan of Salinger and mourning his loss, Malcolm’s article is well worth the read.
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