The Glass Saga
Friedman, Melvin J.
The Glass Saga FRANNY AND ZOOEY, by J. D. Salinger. Little, Brown. 201 pp. $4. Reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman ALFRED KAZIN remarked in a recent Atlantic how unusual it is for a group of...
...He prefaces a few remarks about the form of the story (referring to it as "a sort of prose home movie") before he places Zooey in a bathtub on the Monday morning following Franny's weekend...
...the three active characters, Zooey, his mother, and Franny, never leave the Glass apartment...
...She discovers that she can no longer tolerate the boy friend who demands her "unadulterated good-listenership...
...Franny is refreshingly uncomplicated and straightforward, with the single narrator determining the point of view...
...They have been neatly wedged into their appropriate positions in the Salinger canon and have become essential parts of the Glass saga...
...the furniture in the Glass living room is described in tortuous detail...
...Zooey uses certain of the experimental devices of modern fiction, occasionally offering them in light pastiche...
...Salinger deserts the omniscientauthor point of view and engages in less conventional narrative devices...
...He finally reasons her out of her crisis and forces her off the psychoanalytic couch into "a deep, dreamless sleep...
...Franny and Zooey—originally published separately in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957—have already been studied closely by critics of the stature of Alfred Kazin himself, Maxwell Geismar, and Arthur Mizener...
...After Zooey leaves the bathroom he has a painfully long session with Franny— who has sought refuge on the living room couch—about her metaphysical woes...
...Not only is it important to read Zooey immediately after Franny because one story directly follows from the other but also because they offer the alternatives of Salinger's method...
...Zooey's shaving ritual is given the solemn importance of the Mass, recalling Buck Mulligan's labors in the opening pages of Ulysses...
...Franny has been questioning the conventional values of her society and suddenly has an unsettling emotional experience in the presence of her Ivy League boy friend over a lunch at Sickler's ("a highly favored place among, chiefly, the intellectual fringe of students at the college...
...There is great compression of space in Zooey...
...The two stories read separately in The New Yorker with a two year authorial lapse were not the satisfying experience which one finds now that they are printed together...
...Yet even Franny and Zooey taken together offer a valuable insight into Salinger's purpose...
...Salinger has spoken of Franny and Zooey as being a "pretty skimpy-looking book...
...She asserts her independence through a quasireligious rebellion and a fainting spell—which conjure up the earliest phases of a nervous breakdown...
...Franny is the traditionally told account of the youngest member of the Glass family during a disturbing college weekend...
...The time sequence is distorted in favor of psychological events, often conjured up from the past, rather than current physical happenings...
...Reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman ALFRED KAZIN remarked in a recent Atlantic how unusual it is for a group of stories to have been given serious critical attention before they appeared as part of a volume...
...They are enough to justify Maxwell Geismar's revealing observation: "One begins to realize that this is a sort of Yoknapatawpha County on Park Avenue...
...Both concern the eldest Glass child, Seymour, who is always in the background as a kind of dispossessed spiritual father...
...Zooey follows chronologically from Franny but is more experimental in method...
...A 150-page story occurs in only a small part of a single day...
...Zooey, the next youngest Glass, manages to remain in the tub through fifty pages as he reads a four-year-old letter from his brother Buddy (which is reprinted almost in its entirety and reads like a mockery of Polonius' advice to Laertes) and engages in a strangely cantankerous conversation with his mother...
...And indeed Seymour: An Introduction would reinforce the structural eccentricities of Zooey and serve as an admirable prefatory essay for the volume...
...It uses the elaborate cataloguing devices of a James Joyce or of a Samuel Beckett: all the items in the family medicine-cabinet are faithfully listed...
...One wonders why he did not add two other uncollected stories from the Glass cycle: Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction...
Vol. 25 • November 1961 • No. 11
