BOO KS
127
aware that one is incomparably less honest, as well as less clever, than
she; and that I can think of no writer whose silence would be more
damaging to our moral and intellectual hygiene.
Frank Kermode
UP FROM ADOLESCENCE
FRANNY AND ZOOEY. By
J.
D. Solinge r. Little, Brown. $4.00.
I am not sure why I have liked so much less this time through
a story which moved me so deeply when I first read it in
The New
Yorker
four or five years ago. I mean, of course, "Zooey," to which
"Franny"
is
finally an appendage, like the long explanatory footnote
on pages 52 and 53, the author's apologetic statement on the jacket,
the pretentiously modest dedication: all the gimmicks, in short, which
conceal neither from him nor from us the fact that he has not yet
made of essentially novelistic material the novel it wants to become.
It was, I guess, the novel which "Zooey," along with a handful of
earlier stories, seemed to promise to which I responded with initial
enthusiasm: the fat chronicle of the Glass family which might have
caught once and for all the pathos and silliness of middle-class, middle–
brow intellectual aspiration-the sad and foolish dream that certain
families, largely Jewish, dreamed for their children listening to the
Quiz Kids perform on the radio two long decades ago. For the sake
of that novel, Salinger seemed at the point of making a new start, of
breaking through certain bad habits picked up along the way from
Good Housekeeping
to
The New Yorker.
Certainly in "Zooey" Salinger
had begun untypically to specify the times and circumstances of his
characters; to furnish patiently the rooms through which they moved; to
eschew slickness and sentimentality and easy jokes in favor of a style
almost inept enough to guarantee honesty; to venture beyond an evoca–
tion of adolescent self-pity and adolescent concern with sex titillating
chiefly to adolescents themselves.
But there is, as yet, no novel-only "Zooey," well-leaded and in
hard-covers, flanked by apologies and new promises, but still unfulfilled :
and it is this, I suppose, which has left me baffled and a little disappoint–
ed. In a magazine, Salinger's documentation seemed not quite so ir–
relevant, his furnishings not quite so disproportionate to the events they
frame, the awkwardness of his writing not quite so much a tic of em–
barrassment or a posture of false modesty.
