The novel’s opening section, or “Franny” section, is superficially a vignette detailing Franny Glass’s reunion lunch with boyfriend Lane Coutell on the weekend of the Yale game. In this way, Franny, Zooey, and even their brother Buddy for that matter, are given real and humanistic personas in relation to the people that inhabit their living spaces and endure their brands of intellectual brutality, as opposed to being relegated to mere narrative concepts, or blank mouthpieces for metaphysical speculation by the author. The listening character informs the audience both by the symbolism of the position he/she holds in reference to the speaker, and by the short, meek, and unpersuasive emotive responses they utter in the course of a scene. Salinger’s overdrawn and didactic narrative monologues are transformed into true novelistic scenery simply by imbibing each sequence with the presence of a character listening to the speeches being given, and allowing the audience to study the effects of such unyielding speech. The other, or largely quiet, character in these unique dialogue scenes is virtually always alienated, and that alienation is a reference to the kind of distance from humanity that the central figures labor under. But while the abstractions and mostly uninterrupted pontifications often go on for a seemingly absurd length of time, they adroitly create the novel’s humanistic atmosphere-as unpleasant and irritating as it might be-and make more vivid the characterization of the central figures of the text figures imprisoned by their own hyper-intellectualism and so obsessed by their quests for pure consciousness that they fail to find any joy in visceral experience or sensate feeling, and are oblivious to (or unconcerned with) the social suffering of all of those who are made to listen. At times, the short novel is essentially a series of soliloquies that are augmented by the presence of a reactive and emotive listener in the frame, and in that way it reads more like an epistolary (which they really don’t publish anymore) where obstinate lead characters blather on, unaffected and unimpeded by the objection, disgust or interrogatory of their listeners.

Salinger’s Franny and Zooey is presented in dialogue form, but it is a uniquely narrative type of dialogue where intensely intellectualized characters speak voluminously on philosophical and religious subjects. It’s not too hard to understand why they don’t publish too many books that have basically no plot, and where the author makes basically no attempt at keeping a rhythm or sustaining drama or suspense-but it is a damn shame.

Franny and zooey review