Review: Franny by J.D. Salinger

Franny is J.D. Salinger's short story about a young woman seeking spiritual enlightenment that is usually published alongside Salinger's novella Zooey in a single volume titled Franny and Zooey. I decided to re-read Franny recently (not a huge task, as the story is approximately twenty-eight pages long,) after discovering that originally, it was published as a short story, a whole two years before Salinger published Zooey. I wanted to get a real sense of this one without it being eclipsed by the longer (and arguably more interesting,) Zooey.

Franny feels both very old and dated, yet oddly relevant to the modern world. Franny is suffering from a crisis of self. Although coming from a relatively privileged background, she is seeking deeper truths. Or, it is entirely possible, she is simply having a mental breakdown. In any case, she is questioning everything about her existence and the world around her, she is feeling ill and the whole experience is more or less ruining the lunch that she is meant to be enjoying with her equally privileged boyfriend. 

Similar to Catcher in the Rye, in one sense, Franny is a book about first world problems and the desire to find enlightenment. I won't pretend that I loved this one, because, in all honesty, I didn't. It's an interesting, and realistic, enough account of someone who is going through a crisis of self--Franny holds the world around her in contempt and seems to be using religion and enlightenment as a crutch--but I found that I that I had no strong feelings about the character or her situation. She came across to me as yet another self-centred young adult who thinks that they, and they alone, are the first to question the world around them. However, I feel that what really bothered me was that there is nothing, or no one, that really counters the character and her experiences. On the other hand, this weakness does make it the perfect lead in to Zooey, which continues the story of Franny's breakdown through the eyes of her brother. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more