128
LESLIE FIEDLER
"Franny" itself, which I had not read before, seems to me an
eminently satisfactory piece of reportage, turned in as evidence (at the
demonstration trial of the generations, in which
it
is not clear who is
the plaintiff, who the defendant) by a middle-aged eavesdropper on
station-platforms and at restaurants where the Ivy League young ritually
prepare for watching games and getting laid. It is, at least, scarcely ever
cute, like much of "Zooey" and all of the mere apparatus which with
it ekes out a book; and it ends ambiguously before its author, whose
resolutions are often disasters, can manage to be either sentimental or
sage. In "Franny" for once Salinger demonstrates that he can write of
r'
adolescence without disappearing into it; but "Franny," alas, is com–
pleted by "Zooey," which itself completes nothing.
We have been, I begin slowly to understand, living through a revo–
lution in taste, a radical transformation of the widest American literary
audience from one in which women predominate to one in which ado–
lescents make up the majority. Controlling the market (it is, for instance,
largely to reach them that the more expensive paperbacks were invented
and marketed in new ways by new generations of editors scarcely older
than themselves), they control also the mode. And the mode demands,
in
lieu of the teen-age novelists who somehow refuse to appear, Teen-age
Impersonators, among whom one might list, say, Norman Mailer, Jack
Kerouac, even William Burroughs-certainly the Salinger who wrote
Catcher in the Rye
and invented Holden Caulfield, a figure emulated
by the young themselves, though not by all the young.
Each of the Impersonators I have mentioned speaks only for a
portion of our youth: hip or beat or square, straight or queer or un–
decided. No one writes for all, but inevitably takes his stand: with those
who "turn on" or those who do not, with those who write papers on
Kierkegaard and Flaubert or those who scrawl on the walls of saloons
"Ez for Pres." Salinger, of course, speaks for the cleanest, politest, best–
dressed, best-fed and best-read among the disaffected (and who is not
disaffected?) young; not junkies or faggots, not even upper-bohemians,
his protagonists travel a road bounded on one end by school and on the
other by home. They have families and teachers rather than lovers or
friends; and their crises are likely to be defined in terms of whether
or not to go back for the second semester to Vassar or Princeton, to
Dana Hall or St. Mark's. Their
angst
is improbably cued by such ques–
tions as: "Does my date for the Harvard Weekend
really
understand
what poetry is?" or "Is it possible that my English instructor hates
literature after all?"
I do not mean by reduction to mock the concerns of Salinger's
