Product Description

The author writes: Franny came out in The New Yorker/EM Zooey. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #195525 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 208 pages

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Volume containing two interrelated stories by J.D. Salinger, published in book form in 1961. The stories, originally published in The New Yorker magazine, concern Franny and Zooey Glass, two members of the family that was the subject of most of Salinger's short fiction. Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the "Jesus prayer" as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown. In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the "Jesus prayer" is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails.

Customer Reviews

A book about growing up
I was lent this book by a friend and read it hesitantly, thinking I would be bored by it, but I was not!

This book is a great book about growing up and facing reality. I enjoyed the characters lives and felt for them.

I wish I have read Catcher in the Rye to draw a parallel to this book, but I have not.

Pay attention young writers. Study this book.
Let's face it: if you're only going to write a handful of books in your lifetime, let one of them be The Catcher in the Rye, and let another one be Franny and Zooey. Billed by many critics as two stories I find it more fitting to describe the text as a novella in two parts. One-fifth of the way into Franny and Zooey, the narrator steps directly into the novel to establish, among other things, the narrative contract with the reader. In this section the narrator all but introduces himself as Buddy, the oldest living of the seven children of Bessie and Les Glass. Zooey and Franny Glass are the youngest of these children. This lucid contract with the reader belies the narrative complexities of the novella. The final scene of Franny and Zooey, while the siblings speak to each other on separate phone lines just one room away from each other, is one of my favorite, and one of the most moving scenes in all of literature.

One of the Best Ever
This book is great. Salinger's writing is beautiful. His characters are interesting, intricate, human, and often intense. He doesn't need crazy action sequences or ballyhoo. His characters merely converse with each other, and yet his book is more engaging than almost any action novel, and it is certainly more thought provoking.

This book has changed me. It didn't change my life in any dramatic or wild way, but, having read it, I am now subtly different. For one, I realized that I had slipped into some of the dubious thinking that Zooey describes in the book. Second, I now view literature in a slightly different light. This book certainly stands out in the crowd. Finally, I feel inspired by this book's high quality - I feel slightly elevated. This probably doesn't make sense to you, who are reading this review. Maybe it will after you read the book.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book, although I still think "Catcher in the Rye" is better.

Finally, if you have read The Bible and a little of Epictetus' work, then you'll appreciate certain passages of "Franny and Zooey" a bit more.