| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780316769495 | | Publisher: Warner Books | | Publish Date: 4/1/1991 | | Buy.com Sku: 30048348 | | Item#: RCJ79X | | Dimensions (in Inches) 6.5H x 4L x 0.5T |
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| | | | "Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend--the weekend of the Yale game..." (from the first line) The author writes: FRANNY came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed, in 1957 by ZOOEY. Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I''m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambiguous one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose that sooner or later I''ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I''m very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I''ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.
Annotation:
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.
| PraiseAtlantic Monthly
"The worst of American sophistication today is that it is so bored, so full of categorical aversion to things that writers should never take for granted and never close their eyes to. The fact that Salinger's work is particularly directed against the 'well fed sun-burned' people at the summer theater, at the 'section men' in colleges...at the 'three-martini' men--this, indeed, is what is wrong. He hates them. They are no longer people, but symbols...The problem is not one of spiritual pride or of guilt; it is that in the tearing of the 'sympathetic bond' it is not love that goes, but the deepest possiblilites of literary art." - Alfred Kazin August 1961New York Times Book Review
"This seems to be the nub of the trouble: Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them....He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation. 'Zooey' is just too long; there are too many cigarettes, too many goddams, too much verbal ado about not quite enough....The Glass saga...potentially contains great fiction. When all reservations have been entered...about the direction he has taken, it remains to acknowledge that it is a direction, and that the refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all." - John Updike 09/17/1961 National Review
"[The book] has a certain seductive lure; there is a kind of lulling charm in being assured in that dazzling Salinger prose that one's...urban hangover, one's own horridness, is really not horridness at all but instead a kind of dark night of the soul....'Franny & Zooey' is finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger's tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers..." - Joan Didion 11/18/1961 |
| Author Bio| J. D. Salinger | | Jerome David Salinger grew up in New York City, the son of a Jewish father and a Scotch-Irish mother; his father sold cheese and smoked meats. It is said that the Marx Brothers used to drop by the Salinger apartment. At 17, Jerome David decided to become a writer. He attended private schools, never graduated from college, and served in the Army in World War II, an experience he wrote about, obliquely, in several short stories, most notably "For Esmé, With Love and Squalor". He began writing seriously during the war, but most of his early work was so mediocre he tried to keep it from being reprinted; out of dozens, he chose only nine stories for his first collection. Around 1948, however, Salinger began publishing in "The New Yorker", and his fiction improved dramatically, becoming the classic explorations of youth vs. hypocrisy ("phoniness") for which he became celebrated. Salinger has been married and divorced twice; his devotion to Zen Buddhism is evident in his later fiction. In 1952, he moved from New York to Cornish, New Hampshire, where he continues to live as a recluse on 99 acres at the top of a hill, with a view of five states. He has published nothing since 1965, though he apparently continues to write. Salinger has been called the most widely read and least prolific author in history; his reputation rests on one novel, two novellas, and a handful of short stories. |
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