This instalment of Salinger’s series about the Glass brothers and sisters is a strange, difficult thing. But it’s equally possible that the book would never have struck home.
Possibly, this is because I’m at the wrong stage in life – like The Catcher in the Rye, this struck me as a book that has to catch you at a certain time to really work. Franny and Zooey didn’t get me in the same way. I found it moving to read these reflections on the book – but also, I have to admit, confounding. I read Franny and Zooey as a teenager, 35 years ago, and it launched an existential crisis that took me a few years to pull myself out of. There was also a more troubling reflection on the book’s influence: (Yes, I was subjected to erudite confessional onslaughts for years.) Zooey in particular amazed me – dapper, hectoring, some amalgam of Zen and street smarts – as he bore a resemblance to my elder brother, not least in his behaviour around me. I was a devotee of Salinger’s writing in the 1960s/70s and loved Franny and Zooey. Another wrote movingly of the book’s power to conjure a lost era:
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