Salinger's Easy Victory

...A spiritual crisis in these pages is mainly a question of sweating it out and taking slugs of the truth like a boxer...

...In the long story, "Zooey," Franny's older brother explains that her crusade against academics has been too personal, and that she cannot find salvation by mumbling the Jesus Prayer because she does not really understand or admire the character of Christ...

...When Franny, in emotional turmoil, is asked if she would like to speak to her brother, Buddy, on the telephone, she answers plainly and with small regard for material considerations: "I want to speak to Seymour...

...He is reliable for homlier tasks, like itemizing the furniture of a middleclass apartment or the contents of the medicine chest...

...There follows a good deal of circling and springing about and bruising of vanity before Franny drags herself wearily to her feet for the last round...

...Like the hero of Catcher in the Rye, Franny in the first story of his new book spots pedants and name-droppers everywhere, and has become, for moral reasons, a quitter...

...I don't know what an orthodox Christian would make of this democratization of the Spirit, but I resent the liberties Salinger takes with the word...

...Certainly, there is a lot of unlucky language in Franny and Zooey: "If you do anything at all beautiful on a stage, anything nameless or joymaking...

...Maybe it comes of trying so hard to handle ethics when questions of taste are really his specialty...

...Holden Caulfield's one decent roommate commits suicide...

...No matter how inspirational his reading list, Salinger himself persists in a low opinion of mankind...

...She complains that the faculty poets aren't leaving behind "a single solitary thing beautiful," that wisdom is no longer the goal of knowledge...

...It's Christ himself...

...But there is more to come...

...He seems to be deathly embarrassed by any token of erudition, and must bolster a mention of Epictetus or Zen Buddhism by a frank, virile burst of swear words, or an apologetic phrase like "as Kafka, no less, has told us...

...She gives up a good role in a play (she cannot stand "All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable, and warm"), considers dropping her English courses and faints away just before the football game...

...Like Franny, he is better at telling what personal affectations he doesn't like than locating the moral enemy...

...When Céline tells us it's a rotten universe, he is an honest witness...

...All in all, it looks as though Franny might turn into an Underground Girl...

...Salinger gives a fast greatbooks course, but in name only...

...Is Salinger sincere...

...Reviewed by ISA KAPP Contributor, "Commentary," "Reporter," "Kenyon Review" In spite of the intellectual sponginess of our time, it is still strange to see the optimistic American reader gobbling up J. D. Salinger's stories of defeatism, selfdeprecation and nervous breakdown...

...There is also a well-handled scene in which, over snails and olives, the heroine and her boy friend dramatize the victories and humiliations in the classroom...

...But a novelist or story writer has to want more than the kick of discovering someone in a fraudulent position...

...But as a reader you are only briefly disturbed...

...You cannot find out much about society from Salinger, who only worries about what this crude body has done to violate his own or his hero's integrity...

...Ah, buddy...

...From the knockout blow she learns that it is her duty to do the best she can with her talents for the sake of the "Fat Lady" (the Glass household term for the ordinary human ignoramus, a figure even more abject than the liberals' vanishing "little man...

...After this first round, Zooey's shirt is sopping wet, Franny is down, sobbing but still alert, and both are tinglingly conscious of their form and courage...

...If one of his characters happens to find a friend, the chosen person is usually between 10 and 14 years old, or dear because departed...

...Proust and Camus, who also dealt with hypocrisy and selfdeception, were interested in exactly how they operated in the big world as well as in the small ego...

...The unappetizing image of the Fat Lady is only one rude plank in his program for educating us by adopting a recklessly chummy attitude toward ideas and moral concepts ("who besides Jesus really knew which end was up...

...The best section of Franny and Zooey describes Mrs...

...This cliquish note of self-congratulation is the most antagonizing aspect of Salinger's writing...

...Alfred Kazin has made the sensible point that he cares less about the failure of feeling than about the failure of art in these stories...

...On the level of such psychologizing, small in scope and safely outside the responsibilities of philosophy, a reader may be impressed by the Salinger touch...

...Because you can be sure, if it's Salinger, that there's only a short tunnel to the Revelation...

...Ardent as Salinger is in his pursuit of truth and beauty—an incredible number of actions are designated as beautiful or not in the course of this short book—ambitious as he is to take some critical stand on the H-bomb or "the joys of television and Life Magazine every Wednesday," his confrontations grow shallower and briefer as the problems get larger...

...and, unfortunately, a person who is very conscious of himself and overly concerned with appearances is not able to concentrate on the content of what he is saying...

...It is an easy victory, often quietly insinuated by situations in which the hero is involved with only one or two other people, remarkable as himself, fine in spirit and able to grasp his metaphors...

...Ah, buddy...

...Glass, with her old kimono and an abstracted expression, barging into the bathroom to talk to Zooey who makes scathing comments from behind the shower curtain...

...Almost every page contains some coy, self-conscious formulation...

...He gives you the details and admittedly partakes of the general corruption...

...in the moment before sleep and transfiguration she hears Zooey's voice affirm: "Don't you know who that Fat Lady really is...

...Salinger lets you, infer that he has somehow managed to remain untainted by the humbug, ignorance and academicism that surround him...

...This uncompromising writer wastes no unction on the human condition unless it is extreme...

...The silly collegiate mannerisms despised by Franny, and the "phonies" who crowd the road from Pencey Prep to Penn Station (in Catcher in the Rye) seem, theoretically, to make good material for fiction...

...Seymour has been dead (also by suicide) since an earlier story, "A Perfect Day For Bananafish," and his idealism is therefore beyond question...