Snapshot (+Reminder): Franny & Zooey by J.D. Salinger

Reminder: Please keep in mind that now, while your reading load is very light, you should be exploring potential books for your Three-Book Term project. You will need to have determined which books you will be reading and writing about by mid-second quarter. This research paper is a very significant part of the course.

In case you've forgotten, here's the intro sheet to the project:
Intro Sheet to Three-Books Project [ PDF ]

Meanwhile, I'll continue to present some snapshots of American works we won't be studying together during the year. This time on to J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Here's an excerpt from a seminal review in The New York Times by John Updike in 1961:

...and now "Franny" and "Zooey" have a book to themselves. These two stories--the first medium-short, the second novella- length--are contiguous in time, and have as their common subject Franny's spiritual crisis.

In the first story, she arrives by train from a Smith-like college to spend the week-end of the Yale game at what must be Princeton. She and her date, Lane Coutell, go to a restaurant where it develops that she is not only unenthusiastic but downright ill. She attempts to explain herself while her friend brags about a superbly obnoxious term paper and eats frogs' legs. Finally, she faints, and is last seen lying in the manager's office silently praying at the ceiling.

In the second story, Franny has returned to her home, a large apartment in the East Seventies. It is the Monday following her unhappy Saturday. Only Franny's mother, Bessie, and her youngest brother, Zooey, are home. While Franny lies sleeplessly on the living-room sofa, her mother communicates, in an interminably rendered conversation, her concern and affection to Zooey, who then, after an even longer conversation with Franny, manages to gather from the haunted atmosphere of the apartment the crucial word of consolation. Franny, "as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers," smiles at the ceiling and falls asleep.

read the entire review...