‘Catcher and the Rye’ and ‘Franny and Zooey’

Saw a post about Catcher posted this morning and decided to make my own.

Read Catcher for the first time recently. Wasn’t apart of required reading in high school so I never did, but in the past year I’ve read Nine Stories twice so I gave Catcher a shot.

Did not really like it, frankly, at least in comparison to those tight Salinger short stories. (Or even the longer, rambly ones like Carpenters and Seymour.) It depressed me that I didn’t like it — obviously not entirely hated, there are moments of genius and feeling throughout the book, particularly after his first night in NYC, it was just overly long and repetitive in ways that I found uninteresting. It’s more the redundancy and by “over long” I mean that the general thrust is picked up early on, so that by the time Catcher begins to complicate the ideas, slightly, I was a bit annoyed. Almost like I was patronized to, like I had never felt alienated or felt like I was the only one who ‘fuckin’ gets it, man.’

Likely a symptom of the times, and why it is the most popular/regarded of his work; people did not express these feelings, at least not in books, as far as I know, when it was written.

So in attempt to remedy my feelings about Catcher, I decided to finish Salinger’s books by reading Franny and Zooey. And it did remedy it, wonderfully. I found that FaZ basically made the same point about ‘phonies’ et al. in the first 44 pg. (‘Franny’) that Catcher does over the course of the novel. Then you launch into ‘Zooey,’ which ends up dismantling the entire outlook expressed in Catcher (and Franny) — ‘phonies v. real people’ — and replaces it with empathy and love.

Do not feel like reading his Wikipedia and taking up more of my morning, but I believe sometime after the publication of Catcher and before FaZ, Salinger had his sort of religious epiphany, the effects of which are evident in all his later works.

Also, I find it interesting that these are the only two works by Salinger that one can call ‘novels.’ (FaZ was published as two different stories, but come on.) For whatever that’s worth.

Needless to say I was no longer bummed out after Franny and Zooey.