***Coming Of Age In The 1950s Night-J.D. Salinger’s Franny And Zooey

 

Book Review

From The  Pen Of Frank Jackman

Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger, Little, Brown and Co. New York, 1955

As a person who came of age in the 1960s filled to the brim with all kind of angst and alienation about a world that I had not created, that I had no say in creating, and that did not look like anybody was going to ask my opinion of the only thing that I can think of that might be worse is to have faced those conditions in the hard dead red scare cold war 1950s night. And that is the fate that befalls the characters, particular the Franny of the title, in J.D. Salinger’s lesser classic Franny and Zooey (his main classic being Catcher in the Rye) about youthful angst and alienation in that decade.   

Of course every thoughtful coming of age generation, or at least some members of it are going to face the hard coming of age reality that the world is less than perfect and that members of it, members who cross one’s path, are not going to measure up, are going to be a disappointment, are going to have feet of clay. And that is the fate that befalls the main character here Franny Glass (the main character except the “elephant in the room” the deceased brother Seymour) who finds out, find out after a tough childhood in the spotlight, that all that things that mattered to her school, boyfriend, artistic endeavors cannot fulfill that gnawing want that she has developed as she turns the ripe old age of twenty.    

Yes, Franny is caught up in that search for some spiritual meaning, some method, some system that will give some meaning in an apparently meaningless world. And she drives herself, her mother and her brother, Zooey to distraction in trying to get her to snap out of the funk she is in. Along the way Salinger investigates religion, Christ, truth-seekers, charlatans, children survivors of stunted childhood, perfidy and about twelve other maladies that before any youth can figure out he or she must confront. Salinger made a writing career out of such investigations, and wrote well about the whole phenomenon. Kudos.