For Writers and Readers

A warning: As I was a fan of Catcher in the Rye, I first read Franny and Zooey at age eighteen, and though I enjoyed parts and the theme impressed me so deeply I have required it in a class I teach, still, overall, the novel baffled me.

A lot of years have passed, during which Franny and Zooey has remained on my list of books I meant to get back to, yet I didn’t pick it up until a week ago.

The story goes like this: Franny Glass, a twenty-year-old college student and sometime actor, has fallen into a condition of mind psychologists might or might not regard as depression. She is what many would call an insufferable bitch. She can’t be congenial to anybody. She berates her boyfriend, criticizes her professors, and declines to participate in theater productions because she considers the theater people phonies.

During a break from school, she goes to her family home and pursues the only course of action that makes any sense to her, which is to immerse herself in constant repetition of what she calls the Jesus prayer, which she read about in an old book called The Way of the Pilgrim. The prayer is simply, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” So far as she has a goal, it is to let the practice gradually deliver her into a spiritual condition that will allow her peace and remission from her contemptible state of mind.

Zooey, five years older, is a rather successful television actor. He and Franny and the other Glass children had all appeared, over some years, on a radio show called It’s a Wise Child. All seven of them were brilliant and earned a devoted following. Two of them have since died, Walt in WW II and Seymour, the eldest and probably the wisest, by suicide.

After the mother spends an hour or so hounding Zooey to have a talk with his sister, he succumbs and proves himself every bit as ornery and critical as is Franny, finally arguing that for her to use the Jesus prayer is astonishingly stupid. Because, he maintains, the Jesus she believes in is by no means the Jesus that appears in scripture.

And then, assisted by lessons Seymour, the mentor of his younger brothers and sisters, had given them, he delivers the real Jesus Christ to Franny over pages so memorable I consider them truly inspired.

At some point in your life, either before or after The Brothers Karamazov, read Franny and Zooey.