Title: Franny and Zooey
Author: J. D. Salinger
Pages: 202
Fiction
Franny and Zooey is a short novel spanning a very short amount of time. The first part, Franny’s part, follows her on a lunch with her boyfriend. They talk and argue until Franny passes out a few times and then it goes into the next, longer, part of Zooey. It starts in the bathroom where Zooey is reading an old letter from his brother and then he reads over a script before his mother comes in. The conversation between the two lasts a very long time and then Zooey goes to talk to his sister, Franny, who’s been out in the living room the whole time. She’s been depressed, lying there for days, not eating, and is always carrying this book. The two talk for awhile, then you get Zooey alone again while Franny and their mother talk and then Zooey and Franny talk again on the phone and the novel ends.
Honestly, writing a plot for this is difficult. The majority of the novel is just the conversations. Toward the end the two siblings talk quite a lot about religion since Zooey thinks it has made them both into “freaks”. Their older brothers (Buddy and Seymour – the latter of which is now dead*) taught them certain things while growing up and you get tidbits from the entire Glass family throughout.
It’s also difficult to give this book a rating. It’s very mundane and nothing really happens but it’s very well written (I absolutely love Salinger’s style) and having a book based very much on dialogue is different in a good way. I usually have a hard time writing dialogue, so I think there’s something Franny and Zooey really has to offer for that. It was good, though; I enjoyed reading it. Plus, it goes by rather fast and also gives you some things to think about by the end.
* Seymour killed himself prior to this novel, but the story of his suicide is in Salinger’s Nine Stories.