by J. D.
Salinger
Salinger
became well known from the first moment he published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951.
He had imagined the Glasses, a family with 7 precocious children living in
Manhattan and wrote some short stories and novellas about them.
Franny, (written at first as a short story), and Zooey, (as a novella) are two siblings
in the Glass family, the youngest ones. They, along with the rest of the Glass
children, took part in a radio programme for witty children for many years.
Franny starts
on a winter Saturday morning when she, being an undergraduate student at an Art
college (its name is not stated), meets her boyfriend (Lane Coutell, a senior
student studying Modern European Literature) at a nearby college town, where
they are supposed to watch a Yale-Harvard game and spend the weekend together.
While
having dinner at a nice restaurant, Franny gets so disappointed with Lane
because he speaks incessantly about an essay he had written and the unexpected enthusiastic approval of it by his professor, when he got it back “with this goddam A on it
in letters about six feet high”!
But this was not the beginning to Franny’s
exasperation about values.
It had all started earlier when, as a freshman at
college she gets frustrated with the lack of authenticity and the egotism of
professors and fellow students around her.
She consequently,
can’t stand the complacency and egotism of her boyfriend who is the example of
the good, conventional, “clever” student who will constitute the successful,
educated citizen of society after finishing his studies.
An interesting burst
on the part of Franny follows which results in her breakdown, in the restaurant.
Zooey, is telling the story after the restaurant scene
with Franny and Lane.
The scene is in the Manhattan family apartment now and the
conversation between Franny and Zooey is really compelling.
It’s about the role
of Universities which only fill up students with plain knowledge that does not
lead to being a better person but just how to become successful in society
which means how to make money or perhaps how to become famous.
“You never even
hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom
is supposed to be the goal of knowledge”.
Franny
however is interested in something more valuable than material or intellectual
goods and so she looks for it in something more spiritual, after she finds a small book in the college library “The Way of a pilgrim”.
Her brother
Zooey speaks and speaks to her for a more reasonable way of thinking but at the
end he admits that he shouldn’t have tried to persuade her against Jesus Christ
or any other religious solutions to her existential concerns.
Zooey ends
up by saying that to get out of the situation she found herself in trapped, she
should start acting again which is something she loves doing not minding who
the audience is :“play for the Fat Lady”, as Seymor, the eldest and most
beloved sibling in the Glass family who has killed himself, had
once advised.
Who is the “Fat Lady” though?
A book that can boost one’s thoughts further!
Additionally,
it is excellent, “sweet” literature.
I loved it
and really enjoyed it.
I certainly
recommend it.
