A family so brilliant it can barely see past itself.
Franny and Zooey
Franny's spiritual crisis brings her home to a long conversation with Zooey, the brother who knows exactly how to get under her skin.
186g
Weighs the same as Phone + Lexan Spoon
- Lightweight
- Quiet Companion
- Fiction
Franny Glass collapses mid-date clutching a little green book on unceasing prayer, and her brother Zooey—acting as a tough-love philosopher from the bathtub—talks her back to her feet. It is mostly people talking in rooms, moving from the suffocating anxiety of modern self-consciousness to a stunning realization about grace. A tent on a slow, rainy morning was made for this book, all the way to one of the great last-page turns in American writing.
Field notes
When Franny and Zooey appeared in 1961, Salinger's increasingly spiritual fiction was beginning to exasperate critics. John Updike accused him of loving the brilliant, insufferable Glass children so exclusively that their invention had become a hermitage. Joan Didion went further, dismissing the book's spiritual consolations as self-help for the educated middle class.