The second story in Franny and Zooey opens with Zooey sitting in a bathtub and reading a letter from his older brother, Buddy (who is, curiously, also the story’s narrator).īessie, the matriarch of the Glass family, then enters the bathroom, uninvited by Zooey, and a conversation ensues which is conducted through the drawn shower curtain. Franny has returned to her family’s apartment in New York. Zooey Glass, Franny’s brother and the second youngest of the seven Glass children, picks up the story on the Monday after the disastrous Saturday of the Yale game. She is seen at the end of the story in the office, lying on the couch, silently repeating the Jesus prayer.

Lane Coutell takes her into the restaurant manager’s office, and then goes to fetch a cab. Upon returning from the bathroom, she is okay for a while, but then faints. She is pale and perspiring, and at one point she goes into the bathroom and cries for about five minutes. After a period of time, the constant repetition of this prayer will lead to a form of spiritual illumination, similar to the meditation on “om” in Buddhism or Hinduism.įranny suddenly becomes quite ill – it appears that she is in the throes of a complete nervous or spiritual breakdown. The Jesus prayer is to be repeated continuously until it becomes as much a part of the unconscious functioning of the body as the beating of the heart. It’s a work by a simple Russian pilgrim that describes his spiritual quest, and how he learned to say the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”. She also reveals that she has been reading a book called The Way of a Pilgrim. It is the Yale game, so his school is of the Ivy League variety.ĭuring lunch with Lane at a restaurant, Franny expresses her disenchantment with phony college intellectuals and the egotism that abounds in her school’s Theatre department, which caused her to quit her involvement. She is attending a football weekend at her boyfriend Lane Coutell’s school. The youngest of the Glass family, she’s a student at an unnamed Eastern college. The family history is revealed for the reader, and all the family members enumerated – the parents: Les and Bessie and the seven children: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, the twins Walt and Waker, Zooey and Franny.įranny Glass is presented almost entirely in dialogue. Now, the mythic Glass clan is fleshed out. Salinger had already introduced some of the family members in stories such as “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “Down at the Dinghy”.

It appeared ten years after the publication of his best-seller The Catcher in the Rye.įranny and Zooey is the first book-length treatment of the Glass family. Salinger published a slim volume containing a short story and a short novel that had both appeared previously in The New Yorker. Fifty years ago this September, in 1961, J.D.

The book franny and zooey