We meet the successful actor Zooey wallowing in an overfull bathtub, reading a much treasured four-year-old letter from his sibling Buddy. But, paradoxically, is she any less egotistic than her boyfriend? In his sequel, Zooey, narrated by an older brother Buddy, Salinger provides an answer.

In fact, she is on a journey, with all the physical and spiritual dislocation that that involves. She keeps telling Lane that she thinks she is going insane. Salinger’s skill is to contrast the academically driven Lane, obsessed by his own ego, with Franny’s searching for a spiritual path to a different kind of fulfilment. ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy The reclusive writer Jerome David Salinger: author of Franny and Zooey, and the classic 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye He leaves her to get a taxi, while Franny soundlessly mouths the Jesus Prayer. Lane readily abandons plans for the rest of the day, but, still self-absorbed, tells her that he looks forward to sex that evening. For him, religious experiences have “a very obvious psychological background”. After various adventures, he hears about the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” If one repeats the words over and over again, the prayer becomes self-active, “and the words get synchronised with the person’s heartbeats”. Franny reluctantly tells him that it is about a wandering Russian peasant seeking what it means in the Bible to pray incessantly. Lane asks Franny about a little book that he has seen in her handbag. Franny, increasingly irritated with so much that is phoney in Lane’s egocentric world, and already showing signs of distress, deliberately antagonises him. Over lunch, her boyfriend, Lane, launches into a long monologue about a brilliant paper that he has written.

It will even challenge older readers about where they stand.įranny, the first of two sequential stories about the Glass family, is set on the first day of Franny’s weekend visit to her boyfriend’s college. But, for those concerned with faith issues, particularly when they involve young people faced with the meaning of life, his next work, Franny and Zooey, about the two youngest of the seven Glass siblings, is a must. SALINGER is best known for his coming-of-age first novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

Franny and zooey