Blog From The Bench

FRANNY AND ZOOEY by J.D. Salinger

I've been finding that one of the best ways to chart my maturity as a person is by gaging my reactions to certain pieces of art when I return to them at different points in my life. The first major example of this would be the day in late grade school when I realized how poorly written the Boxcar Children Series is (it's bad to the point of unreadable, even with the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia), and has continued through the more recent reevaluations that has caused VERTIGO and Hitchcock films in general to drop out of my favorite film lists (immaculately polished mystery/thrillers are no longer what I respond to) and the acknowledgment of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as a true masterpiece of American literature (I despised it senior year of high school).

Anyway, I finished J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, which I usually name as my all-time favorite book, about a week ago. It's the third time I've read this married pair of short stories in about a four year block of time (I really can't recall the first time I read it- late high school, I'm pretty sure), and it's taken about a week to figure out what exactly this book says about me and who I am as a reader, as a critic, and as a person.

One of the first things I noticed is that Salinger's prose style doesn't impress me nearly as much as it used to. I used to adore his breezy but sarcastic style, and in many ways that is still a large part of the appeal of his writing: the off-the-cuff fashion he writes his stories (a blend of stream-of-consciousness and straight-forward third person narration), the wry humor, and the astonishingly precarious line he walks between utter pretentiousness and true intellectual sincerity. But at times there seems to be a sense of artlessness in the way Salinger writes (which is perhaps intentional), and he has a noticeable and self-indulgent habit of plunging into lengthy lists of unnecessary details that slow down the general pace of his stories. At the present time I find the most fault in the long-winded repetition- as delightful as the extended exchanges between the characters of Franny and Zooey are, by the second time it happens (on the phone at the conclusion of the story), most of the initial charm has disappeared. The opening narration by Zooey is similarly overwrought and verbose. (But then I can't help but thinking "could Salinger be Salinger without a certain amount of self-indulgence?" And when it comes down to it, I don't think that is possible.)

Not so much in "Franny" (which is rather slight but effectively captures a certain kind of adolescent relationship dynamic that I still find quite appealing), this time more than ever I appreciated not only the views on philosophy, theology, society and art that Salinger shoots endlessly at the reader, but the way Salinger constructs "Zooey" around a series of unexpected set pieces and the focus on the several conversations between Zooey and Franny, and Zooey and Bessie, the weary but endlessly spunky matriarch of the Glass family.

There's just something brilliant about Salinger's decision to set exactly half of "Zooey" in the Glass family bathroom, and a large section of that with Zooey sitting rather spitefully in the bathtub. It's so... unorthodox that I can't help but love it. It's an interesting place to set an extended piece of narrative, as the bathroom could very well be the most intimate and personal room in a house (much more than the bedroom, really), and the habits and details found there can be very telling about a person (or character's) personality. The way that Zooey sits in the bathtub, the way he shaves, the manner in which he uses the shower curtain as a kind of emotional barrier between him and his mother is integral to our perception of Zooey as a character, and occur in a way that wouldn't have been possible to express in any other location in the house. Wes Anderson was wise enough to steal the whole set-up for one of the best scenes of THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, just one of the many homages to Salinger throughout that film.

I also like the way in which Salinger places so much emphasis on the three main conversations in the book (despite my misgivings with the third). To me, this seems to highlight a technique I'm beginning to see running through the entire Salinger oeuvre- dialogue as a means of character development, and ultimately, emotional revelation. There's an intense exploration of the inevitable connections humans make while they talk- the games that are played, and the sheer vulnerability of being emotionally exposed during conversation. Salinger's dialogue is rarely natural- it's a very deliberate and studied (and some would argue " unnaturally literary") exchange of ideas and abstract concepts. But this kind of peculiar dialogue is Salinger at his best, and is of a particular type that can only be sustained and rendered believable in the very contained microcosms Salinger creates in his various short stories (a category Franny and Zooey could be included in). For all his pessimism, Salinger seems to think that the emotional bonds formed through conversations are integral in both creating and dissecting the essence of a character, a theory (whether intended or not) I find fascinating and very, very appealing in nature.

So when all is said and done, is Franny and Zooey still my favorite book? The answer, which I took a long time to consider, is ultimately a resounding yes. I can no longer look past some of its gaping flaws, but I have come to love the book despite, and in some ways because, of its flaws. It's a book jam-packed with thoughts and ideas, sensations and impulses, feelings and emotions, a story of a group of glamorous eccentrics and lovable misfits that reveal beneath their intellectual posturings a very real human heart, and I'll be lucky if I ever reach the same level of awareness and revelation in my own writing.