Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger - Frank Kermode (essay date 1962)
Frank Kermode (essay date 1962)
SOURCE: "One Hand Clapping," in New Statesman, Vol. LXIII, No. 1630, June 8, 1962, pp. 831-32.
[In this essay, Kermode provides a negative assessment of Franny and Zooey, asserting that it is essentially duplicitious and therefore disappointing.]
It seems impossible to review Salinger without reviewing his audience at the same time. There are other accomplished rhetoricians in the field, but no Serious' modern novelist has quite this rapport with a large public. The two stories "Franny" and "Zooey" are seven and five years old; they appeared accessibly in the New Yorker, and have been widely discussed. But when they appear as Franny and Zooey in hard covers there is a marked excitement on both sides of the Atlantic. It doesn't seem to matter that these stories are merely samples, or—to quote the author—'early, critical entries in a narrative series I'm doing about a family of...
[The entire page is 2148 words long]
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