No doubt it heralds a narrowing
in the life of the mind, but I seem to have reached a stage in late middle age where
I find equal or greater pleasure in rereading books I'm already familiar with
as I find in books newly discovered. The
pleasure of rereading is really altogether unique, as you dive into the
familiar text you are reading on two planes simultaneously -- the book unfolds
before you synchronically as the author intended for it to be read and it
unfolds for you asynchronously, as you relive the experience of your prior
reading alongside your current reading. You both read the book and read
yourself reading the book, then and now. The multiple levels of the
experience can be quite enriching -- truly making reading a matter of self-discovery,
as well as a matter of trying to better decipher an author's original intent.
Last night I stayed in my old bedroom in the city and had the pleasure of rereading Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger,
which I found on a bookshelf by the bedside, no longer quite
my own. It's been more than 45 years since I last read the book and I was
curious to see how it stood up over the intervening years. What surprised me is
how dramatically my response to it has changed over time - what had originally impressed
me as most brilliant about Salinger back then strikes me as fairly pedestrian
today whereas what was most perplexing to me about both Franny and Zooey upon
first reading today strikes me as the repository of the book's greatest
value. Such are the paradoxical effects of the passage of time.
Please bear with me as I explain this at greater length.
*********************
Growing up in New York
City in the 1960s and 70s, Salinger enjoyed a demigod status as one of the great Jewish scribblers of the post-War years. Not just Catcher but
all his books were required reading, and over the course of one's adolescence,
as you progressed from Catcher to Nine Stories to the Glass
family saga, it marked the various stages of passage in your own literary
coming of age. And the Glass family in particular seemed to capture and
idealize the sensibility of the milieu in which I was raised -- mixing the high
and low culture of New York City (the Glass parents were vaudevillians after
all), all polished off with such fine literary flair. Salinger's deft
touch and the witty banter of the Glass siblings was the epitome of what passed
for high literature, at least as enshrined in the pages of The New Yorker
during the Wallace Shawn era. In our puerile fantasies we were all potential stars
on the radio show “It’s a Wise Child.” Salinger was a demigod indeed and we read and
reread his stories reverentially, hoping to catch glimmers of ourselves in the
pages.
But compelling as I found
the saga of the Glass family back then, I must admit to having been perplexed by
the nature of the personal crisis Franny was undergoing. To my boyish
thinking she was in the midst of an emotional breakdown -- a diagnosis similar
enough to that voiced by her family and boyfriend -- the causes of which seemed
largely inexplicable. I was inclined to read the story in psychological
terms, which left me groping for some way to make sense of why exactly she
seemed so fixated on reciting the Jesus prayer. It was if the poor girl
had been whisked away by a cult and was now in need of a good
deprogramming. Not that it's ever easy
for an adolescent to make sense of such things, particularly for those with
limited spiritual inclinations of their own; yet even though the wellsprings of
Franny’s angst left me more or less befuddled, it did little to diminish my regard
for the book as a minor masterpiece, nor my estimation of Salinger as a stylist
who seemed peerless.
Fast forward 45
years. I've just put Franny and Zooey aside and find
myself completely underwhelmed by the quality of the writing, at least to the
extent the book is to be judged as a work of realistic storytelling. The
three main characters seem quite poorly drawn, verging on caricature, certainly when compared to the level of realism Salinger was capable of and in fact
achieved in his great portrayal of Holden Caulfield. The whole set up of the Glass family comes
across to me now as contrived and ham-handed – those adorably precocious
children, chain-smoking, name dropping and besotted with spiritual ennui. It’s a cultural mash up of the first order - a dash of Flaubert, with a daub of the Buddha together with a heavy sprinkling of Eloise at the Plaza, something that seems to have been custom tailored to
appeal to sensibility of The New Yorker and its readers but falls woefully
short in terms of creating a plausible family dynamic or half-way believable character
driven drama. Far from the glitter and
glamor that so appealed to me in my youth, the Glass family today strikes me as
utterly transparent as a writer’s artifice – merely an expedient means of
cramming as much high-brow speechifying as possible, which reflects the
author’s own world-view, into the limited space of a short story or novella --
a way to show and tell at the same time, through the overly clever dialog of his
garrulous Wise Child characters.
But what is now most interesting
to me about the book is the spiritual crisis that lies at the center of both
stories. Setting aside the Glass family
as an obvious contrivance, this is clearly Salinger’s crisis and he’s hiding in
plain sight behind each of his straw man characters. In the mouths of Franny and Zooey the dialog
may sound far from credible, but in the mouth of Salinger the words resound as frightful truth. And this is a crisis of the
highest order, a spiritual crisis and artistic crisis rolled into one, as Salinger
at this point in his career is on the verge of self-banishment, from the
spritely world of Gotham City to the dark recesses the New Hampshire woods. In fact, you can see or read each of the
Glass siblings as a stand-in for a different aspect of Salinger’s troubled soul
– the despondent and suicidal Seymour, the reclusive and elusive Buddy, the
precocious and glib Zooey and naïf ingénue Franny – all battling and babbling
for their chance to be heard. Fortunately
Seymour didn’t prevail, at least in real life terms, but Buddy's reclusive impulses were soon to overtake all others, with decidedly negative
results for Salinger’s published output for the remainder of his lifetime.
“An artist’s only concern
is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and
on his own terms, not anyone else’s”, as Zooey counsels his sister in one
of the book’s final passages. Written in
the late 1950’s, there’s a wonderful prescience in those words, anticipating how
Salinger himself was destined to spend the next few decades, writing
and rewriting his novels for an audience of one. As he told the New York Times in one of his
final interviews: “There is a marvelous
peace in not publishing … I like to write.
I love to write. But I write just
for myself and my own pleasure.”
More and more it seems to
me we do writers a disservice when we judge their work strictly in terms of genre and traditional notions of literary merit. Literature be damned – it belongs in the classroom and nowhere
else. Franny and Zooey may be decidedly
second rate in terms of the quality of the story telling but there is a
greatness in its pages all the same, that at least is the conclusion I’ve come
to on rereading. Even a story that's served up under the label of realistic fiction need not be the least bit credible in order to be deeply compelling, as a testament to the author's struggle to fully engage with his or her version of spiritual truth.
