Franny and Zooey
Franny and Zooey sounds like it’d be a Netflix show about female best friends going through a mid-life crisis. Fran gets pissy that Bart wants to grow out his sideburns and Zooey whines that Dennis won’t stop feeding pigeons on their walks. In actuality, it’s a combination of two short stories by J.D. Salinger, originally published separately in The New Yorker as Franny (1955) and Zooey (1957).
For as short as Franny is, it packs quite a punch. Salinger trickily starts out the story by focusing on her lame ass boyfriend, Lane. We think that it’ll be all about him and we inwardly puke. At his arm, Franny comes off as vapid until BAM…she’s throwing not-so-casual questions about the meaning of life at her boyfriend over dinner. He tries to evade her existential lobs but to no avail. She’s insistent upon figuring out the best way to make a lasting impression in this life without becoming a self-interested douchebag. Here, we have Salinger’s distinctive complaints: everyone is a conformist and that makes them phony. And if you deliberately rebel against the textbook trend of humanity, you’re just a different type of conformist-phony! You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Franny is the female version of Holden Caulfield, except she’s slightly less naïve (and admittedly, less off-putting). Both Franny and Holden recognize the superficiality of the world—specifically the adult world—and they don’t want any part of it. But if they don’t have any place within the world, where does that leave them? How can they find the sweet spot where they leave their own unique and beautiful watermark without just stinking up the place with more egotism? Salinger poses these questions and then lets readers answer them on their own.
In Zooey, we learn a little more about Franny and her lineage. Franny and Zooey are siblings who grew up in a freakishly savant family. Zooey shows us a talented youth burdened by intellect. He struggles between bitterness towards the wisdom that accompanies his smarts and gratefulness that he’s not just another egghead drinking the Kool-Aid. He also cracks me up.
Taken individually, Franny and Zooey are heavy; together, they’re extra intense. Franny and Zooey are both so wrapped up in the negatives of life that they can’t actually notice anything nice in the world. Heavy isn’t a bad thing—just know what you’re getting into. I’m a Salinger apologist. He forces us to confront what we’re all thinking: how do I create something in life that is lasting and meaningful? How do I avoid growing up and becoming a sucky adult? As a result, I give Franny and Zooey 5 out of 5 flames.
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