About this title: The book comprises a novella and a short story, both about members of Salinger's famous Glass family, the central figures in most of his later fiction. In "Franny," a bright college student (Franny Glass), like Holden Caulfield in THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, is unable to resolve the conflict between her deepest self and the superficiality of the world. In "Zooey," after Franny's nervous breakdown, her brother Zooey urges her to accept the world and seek to perfect herself.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: Reprint. l0th printing, of 1964 re-print
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books, New York (NY)
Date Published: 1981
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Shows cover-, edge-, wear. Some pp 'chipped' at edges, or creased. 'Tanned'. NO stains, tears, writing, in tight book. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: Young adult. read more
Description: Very good. SOFTCOVER. MMPB. Nice Condition Ex-library copy. Book has been hardbacked by library staff. Normal library markings. Normal page toning. No names, underlining, highlighting, tears, stamps, bookplates, remainder marks, price clips, etc. I ship International orders by Air Mail. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1964
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Book shows two small tears at bottom of spine(one at each corner). Corners of spine show rubbing. One partial crease on front cover. No other crteasing. Text is clean but beginning to tan due age. Binding is tight. 4th Bantam printing. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books
Date Published: 1981
ISBN-13:9780553203486ISBN:0553203487
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. PB (MM), BANTAM EDITION 1964/36TH PRINTING 1981, A GOOD CLEAN USED COPY, AGE WEAR, NICE READ. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: Young adult. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bantam, London
Date Published: 1966
Description: Fair. No dust jacket as issued. Has some wear, light creases and discoloration to cover, peeled off sticker on back cover, one page is slightly torn and folded over, pages tanned. 201 p.; 21 cm. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
"Yesterday was the day of Rakshabandhan, an Indian festival celebrating the relationship between brothers and sisters, and I spent this day some 8000 miles away from my siblings. Last night I spent 2 hours at the dinner table talking to my roommates about those years when I used to celebrate Rakshabandhan at home with my sister and brother, about the years when we were growing up together, about how my brother would make me watch stupid WWE shows with him, how he often got injured playing cricket and it were my eyes that got clouded with tears to see him injured, how it was I who sulked when I heard our father scolding him, how none of us would eat until all three of us siblings sat down to eat together. After yesterday's somewhat long dinner, I picked up Franny and Zooey from the page where I had left it the previous day. And within the next few pages, I was reading this wonderful dialogue between a sister and a brother. The book hadn't been particularly engaging for me so far, now suddenly it struck a chord with me. Franny, the sister, is undergoing an existential crisis and having a nervous breakdown. It is her brother Zooey who holds her hand, understands her and guides her out of it. Their house still holds the fragrance of their childhood days. Differently from The Catcher in the Rye which focuses only on Holden, here we can see the role of the family in shaping the views and opinions of Franny and Zooey. If it is this family that was in some way responsible for bringing about Franny's crisis, it is her family itself that helps her get through it.
And that is just one of the possible ways in which one could remember this book. It is capable of speaking to different people in a different manner, possibly in a very personal manner. The narrator of the story himself brings up the debate about it being a mystical story or a love story. It could easily be either one or both depending on the reader. Franny raises several profound questions and Zooey provides very thoughtful answers. Franny's questions could be rephrased to mirror some of the questions we might have faced at one point or another. And Zooey's answers could resonate with our own lives in some way. One is likely to spend more time thinking about this novel than in actually reading it."
"Classic Salinger, although not quite as good as 'Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters' but the characters' dialogue is hilarious. It's a great way to get to know the other members of the "Glass" family- they're a bit disturbed to say the least. Entertaining!"
"Originally, the stories "Franny" and "Zooey" were published separately in a magazine, but they were meant to be read together. The first, shorter story "Franny" is about a girl from a family of smart children who is disillusioned with all of the (Salinger's favorite term apparently) phonies in higher education - the fake "seers", or knowledgable students who just like to hear themselves talk about anything smart that doesn't really have any deep meaning to them, as well as the professors, ranging from "just a day job" to "look at what I know" who have the same shallow knowledge... factual, even non statistically (can name all the great opinions of ivory tower classics), but not wise...not meaningful to them. Franny eventually tries to find her own passion (I'm being vague so as not to spoil), and ends up caving and half-breaking down under the pressure to be fake and proper. At this point we enter the Zooey story, much longer and complex, but giving meaning to the characters if you pay attention to all the jumble of flashback, letter-in-a-story, semi-tangent detail. Zooey eventually figures out Franny's problem and provides insight (not to give away too much) that is very applicable to a college student, and any person trying to find their purpose / destiny in life. This book is insightful, realistic and detailed, and not cheap.. it is a must read."
"The Jokers Wild was a syndicated game show of the late 70s and early 80s, hosted by Jack Barry, in which contestants alternately answered lightweight trivia questions and pulled a Brobdingnag lever which operated a giant slot machine.
The studio set was exquisitely representative of its era - an unsettling mash-up of Don Ho era Vegas, S&M rumpus room, and vintage K-Mart. Wikipedia is far more thorough in its descriptions if that happens to pop your tent: "The joker machine was surrounded by two borders that are somewhat shaped like a 'C', each containing 46 red bulbs, and the category windows were surrounded by chase-light borders. The rest of the set was of a white and red configuration. When the syndicated version began airing in 1977, the set remained somewhat the same but with more red light bulbs (increased to 102 on each side) and a modified chase-light border around each of the category windows. The following year, more chase lights were added (64 on each outside border), and the red lights began flashing as well." (I don't know about you, but I'm picturing someone rewinding and pausing a snowy Betamax tape to count chase-lights. Yes, there is such a thing as a surplus of data. Who was wondering when red lights began flashing? Was it a seminal moment?)
My chief (and most unfortunate) remembrance of The Joker's Wild was that it was on television when my mother and father returned from the hospital and said that my maternal grandmother had died from cancer. I was far too young and too youthfully callous for the actual absence of my grandmother to be significant - other than as a precipitant for menacing family get-togethers in which heavily-rouged women puckered in my nearest airspace and amused themselves at my shy doltishness.
What was a more pressing concern was death itself. What was it? How did it work? I needed some groundrules, some contours, some reassurances. What seemed the most hideous and cruel aspect of death was that, while it occurred, games shows continued to go on. Shouldn't the world stop for death - each and every one? Don't we owe it to life to grieve its loss as if it were sacred, even to grieve for strangers and enemies? We shouldn't have time for anything but grief and loss. (Can you understand why I'm medicated now?)
Anyway, my preoccupation with death thereafter grew bizarre and unhealthy. I couldn't say or think the word itself; I preferred euphemisms like "stopped breathing." I couldn't fall asleep because sleep was like death in disguise. When I heard about someone's - anyone's - death, I had to stop myself and become severe, stop laughing or playing. I imagined death as an elaborate game in order to defer its consequences.
In J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, Franny Glass's unhealthy preoccupation isn't death, per se; it's spirituality, or perhaps descending to the essence of the matter, it's ritual -- another version of game-playing and deferment. In order to obscure her fears of the uncontrollable, she gives herself over to the ritual private recitation of a prayer, which when perfected will become integrated with her physiology so that she will not have to utter it consciously; it will merely be part of her.
Her singlemindedness, in order to evade her dissatisfaction with the world, ultimately leads to her nervous breakdown. "Nervous breakdown" is a conversational rather than clinical description; it's far too vague to be useful. I have used that expression myself, however, to describe any head-on, injurious collision between a person's deeply-held illusions and the brute facticity of the life around him or her. This is exactly what happens to Franny -- in a restaurant while she is having lunch with her "typical" boyfriend, a rather boring, insensitive lug who's more interested in the trappings of a well-lived life rather than in questioning what a well-lived life might actually be.
The second half of Franny and Zooey takes place in the Glass apartment, where Franny's brother Zooey (playfully?) argues with their mother and engages in an ad hoc "talking cure" with Franny, who is holing up on the living room couch, recuperating from her breakdown.
This book and all of Salinger's works are intensely personal for me because they are always and everywhere analogous in some profound way with my life. I lived through Franny's breakdown myself when I was fifteen, home alone, and ran outside coatless in midwinter in terror that I was dying of a heart attack. A fifteen-year-old dying of a heart attack! Needless to say, this wasn't a happy foreshadowing. If that was fifteen, then what would sixty-five be like? Or eighty?
All of Salinger's works are, in a way, about a failure of communication between life itself and the illusions we sometimes build up to shield our dissatisfaction with it.
To this day, I always associate the late 1970s aesthetic (deep-pile shag carpeting, big-bulb vanity lights, wide lapels, synthetic fabrics with a dampish sheen, wood panelling, knotty pine, etc.) with death thanks to a psychological extrapolation from The Jokers Wild... Every time death asserts itself again - which is just another way of saying life asserts itself -- I'm back in our green-shag carpeted living room on Arrowhead Drive, in my fuzzy, pilled pajamas, confronting reality again but for the very first time.
The writings of J.D. Salinger know this, understand this, and that's why they're essential to me. They're immune to any literary criticisms (which, nevertheless, I would disagree with anyway) or any appeals to practicality.
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