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Apr 27, 2016gord_ma rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Both "Franny" and "Zooey" are excellent chapters in the story of the Glass Family, with a meaning and an influence far greater than such short stories usually possess. "Franny" is a fairly straightforward story of a brilliant young woman, who has an existential breakdown because she is no longer able to tolerate the conceit of being around dumb and ordinary people devoid of spirituality. "Zooey," meanwhile, is a more challenging story of Franny's cathartic recovery. After reading "Zooey," J.D. Salinger's meandering 1957 novella, and then looking at the history of its publication in Kenneth Slawenski's excellent biography, "J.D. Salinger: A Life," I wasn't that surprised to know that this unusual story was unanimously and viciously rejected by the fiction department of "The New Yorker." However, since this was a work by J.D. Salinger, a most unusual and most gifted writer, the ordinary rules of what made good writing could be nudged aside. And so, I shouldn't have been so surprised to read that William Shawn, then Editor in Chief of "The New Yorker," picked up "Zooey," and to the embarrassment of the fiction department worked with Salinger to revise the novel until it was published. "Zooey," as a traditional piece of fiction, fails on many levels: it's too long, it's too confusing, it's too indulgent, etc. And I think the argument rings true that Salinger, like Jack London, while a master of the short story, was not particularly adept with the novel. Yes, “The Catcher in the Rye” is a classic novel, but it is an episodic adventure, a deft stitching of multiple short stories. "Zooey," meanwhile, is structurally indulgent, even excessive: the 155-page novel devotes the first half to a technically-astute introduction to Zooey Glass, his mother, and their messy apartment. Indulgently, almost absentmindedly, the pay-off from reading “Zooey” in its entirety arrives in the last quarter of the novel. (There’s something about Zooey.) For me, "Zooey" is a book about many things. It’s a slice of life or a home movie of the Glass Family. It's a story about Zooey, Franny's older brother, teaching her to find the goodness in all people and to love them through the goodness in their actions, and in doing so restore Franny's faith in the world. It's about the development of Franny from emotional-intellectual-spiritual confusion to enlightenment. And "Zooey" is also about how a writer with an unhappy childhood, who survived Utah Beach, the Battle of the Bulge and of the Hurtgen Forest, who helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, learned to deal with the pain he had felt and horrors he had seen, and how he taught himself to live again. In these ways, "Zooey" is an original and memorable answer to three questions: 1. How could it all go wrong? 2. When did we become so ordinary? 3. How can I live again? "Zooey," despite its strange, indulgent execution and its diffuseness, is J.D. Salinger's clever and Zen answer to these questions: To begin to know and to love others, one must know and love yourself. [2014-02-10]