Do It for the Fat Lady: Spiritual Crisis and Comic Mercy in ‘Franny and Zooey’
J.D. Salinger’s Quiet Classic Still Speaks. Who’s Listening?
In the final section of Franny and Zooey, the latter of our titular characters walks into the abandoned bedroom of his two older brothers, Seymour and Buddy, both of whom moved out several years before, their room largely unchanged since.
A pair of beds, desks, chairs, and a few other items occupy the space. “The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books,” says the narrator. “Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing.”
One of those books forms the reason Zooey has entered the room, though not because he’s looking for it. It’s already been found—and has already caused a fair bit of trouble.
The Trouble a Book Can Cause
J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, though published as a novel in 1961, began life as two separate stories. As readers opened their January 29, 1955, issue of The New Yorker, they met the first and, through it, Franny.
We encounter her through the eyes and hopes of her college boyfriend Lane. He waits at a station, eager for Franny to step off the train, into his arms, and away for a shared weekend. They spot each other the moment she emerges from the car, and in a moment they’re together.
“She threw her arms around him and kissed him,” says the narrator, continuing: “It was a station-platform kiss—spontaneous enough to begin with, but rather inhibited in the follow-through. . . .” Poor Lane. Deflation awaits; Franny is in the midst of a crisis.
As Lane takes Franny’s luggage, he notices a small green, cloth-bound book in her hand and asks about it.
“This?” Franny says about the volume. “Oh, just something.”
But that can’t be. Later, as their lunch in a nearby restaurant descends into disappointment, Franny retreats to the restroom where she clutches the little book like a talisman, holding it to her breast, as if squeezing solace and serenity from it before venturing back to the table and facing the man she should want to be with but doesn’t.
As talk returns to the book, Franny describes it. She got it from the college library, she says. It’s The Way of a Pilgrim, a Russian spiritual classic in which a humble seeker learns the secret of true communion with God through repeating the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”
“Those are the best words to use when you pray,” she explains. “Especially the word ‘mercy,’ because it’s such a really enormous word and can mean so many things.” A kind of spiritual merger, a union, happens the more a person repeats and internalizes the prayer. “You get to see God,” she says.
But something’s off. Lunch is a disaster. Both parties are distracted by their own concerns, and Franny can’t stop making snarky and sarcastic comments about academic vanity and gamesmanship. Everyone’s phony and fixated on tearing things down while puffing themselves up. It’s all ego, ego, ego. As she broad brushes the English department, her denunciations run right over Lane and his own hopes.
The whole situation would have blown up eventually. As it happens, they don’t even make it out of the restaurant. Franny displays signs of not just emotional distress but physical strain as well. As she soundlessly mouths the Jesus Prayer, mercy takes a strange shape: Franny blacks out and collapses.
And there it sat for readers of The New Yorker. What happened? Many apparently speculated that Franny was pregnant, a possibility that irked the easily irked Salinger. Wasn’t it obvious what happened? Why can’t they see it?!
Franny’s breakdown has nothing to do with a secret pregnancy, as Salinger made clear in his May 4, 1957, followup, the second of our two stories, also published in The New Yorker.
Franny and Zooey features no plot, as such. It’s composed of, depending on how you count them, four conversations. The story “Franny” contains one, the restaurant blowup between Franny and Lane. The story “Zooey” contains the other three, though the first—a lengthy letter to Zooey from his older brother Buddy—is rather one-sided.
As a narrative device, the letter has several virtues. One of which? It allows Salinger to get across how irrepressibly odd is the Glass family, of which Franny and Zooey are the youngest members. The kids, a passel of child celebrities, were roped into a radio show called It’s a Wise Child.
Since we’re all aware of how healthy and well-adjusted child celebrities usually turn out to be as adults, there’s no need to belabor the point that the entire Glass brood shows signs of breakage. Franny is only the most recent to crack.
Home Is Where the Problems Are
Zooey rereads the letter as he soaks in the bath; he’s read it many times before. Like Franny’s little green book, it’s as if it contains a deep truth to which he returns for solace—and something more, something like an explanation of his strange world. Unlike Franny, who seems to have uncritically appropriated the message of The Way of a Pilgrim, Buddy’s letter represents a conversation partner for Zooey’s thoughts, an ever-evolving negotiation for self-understanding.
The third conversation interrupts the second. As Zooey sits in his bath with his letter and his thoughts, his mother barges into the bathroom and begins pestering him about his sister. Franny, as it turns out, has returned home since her collapse in the restaurant and is now convalescing in the living room, spread out on the sofa, avoiding meals, and driving her mother to fear the worst. Her girl needs help, but Mom’s at a loss.
Between the bath and Zooey’s getting out and getting ready for the day, mother and son go back and forth about Franny and their dysfunctional family. “We’re freaks, the two of us, Franny and I,” says Zooey. Mom is mostly clueless about the underlying dynamics, and Zooey is snide and sarcastic—it apparently runs in the family. But she’s earnest and wants to understand.
Lane has told her everything he knows. It all goes back to that little book—“that little book she kept reading all yesterday and dragging with her everywhere,” Mom tells Zooey.
He cuts her off: “I know that little book. Go on.”
She explains what she heard from Lane, that the book is “terribly religious,” even “fanatical” (italics in the original), and that Franny picked it up at the college library.
Zooey knows better. She didn’t get it at school, however plausible the story might seem. No, she got it from that room of books—or, more accurately, from the desk of the room’s older occupant, the now-departed senior member of the Glass children, Seymour.
“That little book,” says Zooey,
is called “The Pilgrim Continues His Way,” and it’s a sequel to another little book, called “The Way of a Pilgrim,” which she’s also dragging around with her, and she got both books out of Seymour and Buddy’s old room, where they’ve been sitting on Seymour’s desk for as long as I can remember. Jesus God almighty. . . . [B]oth books have been sitting on Seymour’s goddam desk for years. It’s depressing.
All of our problems start at home, don’t they?
And it wasn’t just what the parents knowingly did—that is, subject their kids to fame and public scrutiny from an early age. It was also the stuff the parents unknowingly did—negligently leaving them vulnerable to influences without sufficient attention. But it’s possible that most of the solutions to our problems start at home as well.
Do It for the Fat Lady
In the fourth and final conversation Zooey confronts Franny. I won’t reveal all that’s said or how, except to say that whatever we do, we must do for the least of these—that, and one can pack a lot of love in snark if one’s heart is in the right place.
Franny’s self-superior obsession about ego and deflating every balloon she encounters ironically comes while she’s busy mouthing the Jesus Prayer. Zooey’s perceptive enough to realize the poison of that incongruity. He’s also perceptive enough to recognize the antidote.
He tells Franny about an instance when he protested having to shine his shoes for the radio broadcast. Seymour told him look sharp, but Zooey refused.
“The studio audience were all morons,” Zooey recalls of his argument at the time, “the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat.”
Besides, it was a radio show! The audience couldn’t see his shoes. Seymour knew better. “He said to shine them anyway,” says Zooey. “He said to shine them for the Fat Lady.”
Apparently, Seymour understood that “depressing” little book on his desk. They weren’t doing the show for themselves. They were doing it for the audience. He was trying to show his little brother that he must put forward his best effort—that is, he must love—not for himself, but for the audience, personified as an unattractive woman, probably afflicted with disease, simply hoping for something satisfying from the broadcast.
Earlier Zooey takes Franny to task for her crusade against all the egotists in the English Department—and, by extension, the world—a crusade which has landed her in existential straits, a full-blown psychological meltdown. “You don’t just despise what they represent,” says Zooey. “You despise them.”
One can’t take Jesus’s name on the lips if one hates one’s neighbor in the heart. Because, says Zooey, echoing what he earlier learned from Seymour, Jesus is the Fat Lady on the other end of the airwaves. He’s the egotist in the English Department. He’s the other we despise.
Worth reflecting on how we process our politics and other high-stakes commitments, no? Spirituality with the right motives can lift our burdens, but with wrong motives it can assault our souls.
When the two stories were finally merged into a single novel in 1961, critics were uncertain what to do with its plotless, dialogue-dense passages. Some thought it was self-indulgent. Others said the conversations came off as forced or false. Still others felt inexplicably drawn to it, especially its realistic depiction of spiritual crisis. As for Salinger, he seemed to care less and less what anybody thought and slowly retreated from public view.
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"One can’t take Jesus’s name on the lips if one hates one’s neighbor in the heart." Wow - that hits hard.
It sounds like Seymour helps Zooey "see more" of what we are called to do if we truly care about those around us. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)
One of my favorites. There's gems around every corner.
When Zooey is talking about the depressing mediocrity of the scripts he reads, and he says, "I wish to hell everyone would go home."
He's talking about a specific screenwriter there, one who was born in the country and whose first script was fresh, new and actually revealed a lot about the human condition. However, the screenwriter had been in NYC a while, and now latched on to whatever trend was going around. His writing became stale.
I always felt Salinger meant we all needed to go home to our real experiences and draw from them to create art. I think it's more relevant now than ever. So much of what I read is a critique of what others have said, repeated over and over until it's reduced to brain mush.
Thanks for the review.