Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey
by J.D. Salinger
read: 2012

Another book for Professor Hungerford's class on the American Novel since 1945.  Like Wise Blood, it has a lot of religious themes and features a lot of unlikeable characters - the short story "Franny" that opens Franny and Zooey is painfully and deliciously cynical in its treatment of Franny's boyfriend Lane Coutell and his pomposity - but it feels closed in, almost like a play (a point Hungerford makes in her lecture).  The story is almost all dialogue, and it can be didactic at times.  Franny and Zooey don't come to any ultimate epiphanies through actually living life - they do it through the mere power of words.  Hungerford suggests this is part of the point, emphasizing that it is the shared language of the Glass family  that has the power to change minds, but it still feels a bit hollow.

That said, the message of the story is really profound: a major part of the human experience is doing one's best even when one doesn't know why.