Review: Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Relatively short (literally a combination of a short story and a novella) and sweet and fun to read, but with an unexpectedly subtle sort of sophistication involved. It gives off a familiar sensation if you've read Catcher in the Rye, particularly with regards to main characters who dislike phoniness in other people and whatnot, but the tone seems to have matured a bit here, in part due to the Glass family members being older and in a different stage of life than Holden was. If anything, I'd say this is much better than Catcher was, although I can see why that novel is still widely taught in high schools today; Franny and Zooey is a rather different kind of beast altogether and seems to more appropriately address the college-age-to-mid-twenties-going-on-thirties crowd.

This being my first introduction to the Glass family (Salinger wrote a sizeable number of short stories covering the other family members as collected in Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam among other things), I found myself really enjoying reading about Franny and Zooey and the unique dynamics of their relationship with each other and the rest of their family. Their quirks or flaws so to speak can be a little offputting at first, particularly Zooey's condescending attitude towards his mother and sister, but at the same time, there's a devastatingly honest sort of self-awareness that punctuates each interaction, one that underscores the overall mood of the work.

It might sound odd, but the Glasses strike me as the kind of people who I'd love to meet in real life: not perfect or necessarily even decent by any means, but still able to examine themselves and others earnestly, and in Zooey's case, truthfully without flinching. He may be an asshole at times, but he's such a likeable and well-intentioned one at that (or so I found, anyway) that he comes across rather amusingly and more than makes up for whatever crap he's said or done by the end of the novella. The ending itself blew me away both in its implication and in how calmly it came about, or perhaps I've been experiencing too many loudly climactic stories lately.

It's one thing to read a story about a dysfunctional family; it's another thing to read a story about a dysfunctional family that not only is well aware of its flaws but is still able to somehow function in a somewhat satisfactory and also surprisingly beautiful sort of way. I don't know really know how else to put it. But let's just say I'm looking forward to reading another one of Salinger's Glass family stories in the near future.