[In the following review, Bode analyzes the "medieval" quality of Salinger's novella.]

The most remarkable thing about Salinger's pair of stories is how old they are. Their kind is medieval at the very least. "Franny" is a Dialogue between Body and Soul, in terms not much changed since the Middle Ages. The only notable difference is an important one, however. Body and Soul seem here so disassociated that little give and take results. Though the Soul displays a tinge of respect for the expression of its antagonist, to the Body the dialogue as dialogue hardly exists at all. This disassociation Salinger makes profound. It is a matter not only of words but of attitudes and actions. Perhaps the very extent of the cleavage is what makes the story most modern. The medieval moralist, for instance, could paint his fat burgher in lurid colors but there was something appealing in his grossness, his triple chin, the sheer gusto of his appetites. Not so in "Franny." What strikes us here is how bitterly Salinger hates the Body.

A college man named Lane Coutell waits at the station for his girl, Franny Glass, a guest at the big football weekend. When she arrives he takes her to a restaurant for drinks and lunch. During their stay at the restaurant they bicker and Franny becomes so overwrought that she flees to the restroom. There she cries convulsively. When she rejoins Lane their dialogue, raised now, begins again. It ends when Franny leaves the table for a second time and faints.

Lane is so ordinary that Salinger does not bother to describe him. The only physical attribution is unpleasant: Lane's long fingers are his vanity. We know him, and know him well, through what he does rather than through how he looks. We know him through his actions. These are never really good, they are seldom neutral, and they are often offensive. From the start of the story Salinger takes the privilege, relished by Victorian writers but rarely used today, of criticizing what one of his characters does. "Lane himself lit a cigarette as the train pulled in. Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person." Salinger's indignation is sharpened by his irony. His hostility is so open that the effect is overdone. After Franny's arrival and throughout the long luncheon Lane remains repellent. There are degrees—he is more so at one time than another—but he never makes much claim on the reader's regard.

But Franny we are invited to love. She looks beautiful and acts beautiful. Even when she is distraught. Just before her paroxysm of crying she presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. Salinger says, "Her extended fingers, though trembling, or because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and pretty." When she returns to Lane's table she looks "quite stunning." The extent of Salinger's commitment to her is shown by the frankly naive quality of his praise. There is something far from sophisticated in his descriptions of her—"quite stunning" is schoolboyish—just as there is in his descriptions of Lane's offensiveness.

She is both beautiful and good. To a degree she represents embodied Soul. But in "Franny" she is lost and trying to find her way. She has been looking around her, with more and more desperation, for the absolutes. In her search she finds it far easier to detect what she is not after than what she is. Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher she can tell the phoney from the genuine, though she is never as offhand and intuitive in doing so. She is subtler but more apt to be confused. Yet she knows, for example, that the "section men," the glib graduate students who take over the literature classes in the professors' absence, are frauds when they tear down Turgenev to build up their own favorites. As the luncheon goes along she sees that Lane, who postures like them about a paper he wrote on Flaubert, is also a fake.

Her testing for the beautiful is of a piece with her testing for the true. The English department at her school includes two widely heralded poets, Manlius and Esposito. Lane is impressed. Not only are they two of the best men in the country, he says, they are poets. "They're not" is her flat answer. She tries to make clear to him what the beautiful is. It is not the much reprinted poems of Manlius or Esposito. These two leave nothing beautiful behind them. They and their sort write verses which at best "may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings—excuse the expression." These men may reach the mind but never the heart. Franny fails to make Lane understand, however, the more so because she herself remains unsure of what the beautiful is and how to find it.

She is a little clearer about the good. She says that through her Religion Survey course she has come upon a small book by a "Russian peasant, apparently," called The Way of a Pilgrim. He wanders about Russia looking for someone to tell him how to pray without stopping. Ultimately he meets "a starets—some sort of terribly advanced religious person" who directs him to a wonderful collection of the writings of the Church Fathers, the Philokalia or "The Love of Spiritual Beauty." There he finds his treasure and learns how to pray incessantly. Then he goes about teaching others. His message, which so appeals to Franny, is that even though you start by merely praying words, if you persist the word will become the reality. The good, the beautiful, the true will grow apparent. You will, Franny explains to Lane, "purify your whole outlook and get an absolutely new conception of what everything's about."

Striving for the Pilgrim's knowledge has made Franny change. She has given up dramatics, which before meant a great deal to her. She has surrendered some of her comfortable ideas of excellence; for example, she used to think Manlius remarkable but now she writes him off as just another poor fellow. She has lost most of her illusions about Lane, leaving in their place, however, enough of a feeling of guilt to make her demonstrative. The less highly she thinks of him the more warmly she holds his hand. Just before the story opens she has written him a letter full of affection; in the course of the story she admits solemnly, "I had to strain to write it." Throughout the luncheon the strain of her search and the compulsion to apply her new standards are always present. She tries to stifle them but is only briefly successful. Twice the tension in her comes to a peak. The first time is when she leaves the table and sobs in the restroom, the second when she collapses and loses consciousness.

During the meal she tries tensely to show Lane what she is looking for. While she pleads with him—indirectly—for understanding, he sits and eats. She cannot bring herself to touch her own slight meal. Her forehead glistens with sweat, she turns pale, her hands shake. But Lane plods with workmanlike pleasure through his food. He has ordered snails, frogs' legs, and a salad. Salinger makes us watch while Lane cuts all this up and stuffs himself. As Franny sits in torment he finishes everything on his plate. Then, "thoroughly relaxed, stomach full," he dismisses all that Franny has had to say—and she excuses herself only to faint.

As the story ends, Lane intimates that he will attempt to reach her by a back stair, when she feels better, and sleep with her. Then he leaves. Franny, now lying in the restaurant manager's office, looks at the ceiling and moves her lips in the Pilgrim's prayer.

"Zooey" is the complement of "Franny." Much longer, it is, on balance, just barely as good. Essentially it is a theological tract, of three sections which easily fall apart but which taken together constitute the answer to the question of "Franny." They give Franny herself what she is looking for. Salinger takes care to deny that "Zooey" should be considered a tract—or as he puts it "a mystical story, or a religiously mystifying story"—and calls it a love story. It is not. Or if it is, so is the New Testament.

A better and shrewder technical term for the story is the other one he uses: a home-movie. In form and content both, "Zooey" seems home-made, family-style. The Glass family are the cast. Only three appear in the film but the rest are often invoked. The parents are Bessie and Les Glass, a pair of ex-vaudevillians. We never see Les but Bessie brilliantly plays herself through the picture. Their galaxy of children ranges from the oldest, Seymour (now dead nearly seven years but still a strong influence), to Franny, the youngest. In between come Buddy, a kept writer at an unnamed college; three other children with no direct bearing on the present story; and Zooey, described as one of the most popular leading-men in television. Nearest in age and spirit to Franny, he plays the main role. Salinger insists on the remarkable excellence of the Glass children's minds. All the children have in their time been regulars on a noted juvenile quiz show, It's a Wise Child. There and elsewhere all have shown extraordinary powers. One of the younger boys, for instance, once got over an unhappy love affair by trying to translate the Mundaka Upanishad into classical Greek. And Franny is not only beautiful but so talented an actress that even her brothers admire her acting.

"Zooey" opens with a piece of professional posturing. Salinger puts mirrors face to face; between them the narrator preens. Buddy Glass, the older, "writing" brother tells the story. In the posturing introduction he implies that he is both the author of a long letter, which will be reproduced, and of the narrative to follow. As Salinger has him put it, "The style of the letter, I'm told, bears a considerably more than passing resemblance to the style, or written mannerisms, of this narrator, and the general reader will no doubt jump to the heady conclusion that the writer of the letter and I are one and the same person. Jump he will, and, I'm afraid, jump he should." One argument can be made for this posturing: it continues throughout the story.

It appears in the style itself. Buddy is bound to remind his readers that he knows a cliché when he sees one. Even near the climax he writes self-consciously. "This was the first time in almost seven years that Zooey had, in the ready-made dramatic idiom, 'set foot' in Seymour's and Buddy's old room." The posturing appears still more in the content of "Zooey," especially when Salinger wants to impress us with the depth of the Glass erudition. Again and again he has Zooey, in particular, pour out a fund of religious information, usually esoteric, in the matiest possible accents. "This is Kaliyuga, buddy," he will remark, "the Iron Age." Or he will burst out, "I feel like those dismal bastards Seymour's beloved Chuang-tzu warned everybody against." It can be argued that this is Buddy writing rather than Salinger just as it was Holden Caulfield speaking in The Catcher. But Zooey shows off in dialogue which Buddy is reporting and not composing. Some of this pretentiousness is clearly Salinger as Salinger anyway, as we can see from his other Glass stories. And it is this pretentiousness which is largely responsible for the mixed effect "Zooey" gives. "Seymour's beloved Chuang-tzu!"

The three sections of "Zooey" differ considerably from one another. The first, after the unnecessary introductory letter, is a delightful tour de force. It presents Zooey and Bessie in the Glass bathroom. While Zooey bathes and shaves, Bessie beetles her way around, worrying about Franny, who is now back home. The dialogue alternately rushes and meanders; the comedy timing is admirable. Salinger describes Zooey's and his mother's actions with loving care. The writing turns at times almost hypnotic, for Salinger can list the contents of a medicine chest and make us read every word. The effect of the dialogue and brilliant stage directions is much like that of some play by Samuel Beckett, say, Krapp's Last Tape.

The second section takes Zooey from the bathroom to the living room, where Franny is sleeping on a couch. After some theological backing and filling, he quizzes her on her breakdown, her praying, and her religious feelings. She becomes more and more harrowed as he goes through his maneuvers. The second section climaxes when she says, almost inaudibly, "I want to talk to Seymour." Zooey proceeds with his questions and answers, however, probing as far as he can into her mind. He continues, in fact, for another twenty pages after Franny says she wants to talk with her dead brother. It takes that long for Zooey to know that he is beaten. Then: "In an instant, he turned pale—pale with anxiety for Franny's condition, and pale, presumably, because failure had suddenly filled the room with its invariably sickening smell."

In the final section Zooey calls her on the telephone, pretending that he is Buddy—that is, the best surrogate for the dead Seymour. To answer the phone Franny returns to her childhood and to the womb. As she goes down the long hall in the apartment, she appears "to grow younger with each step." By the time she reaches her parent's bedroom door her "handsome tailored tie-silk dressing gown" looks like a small child's woolen bathrobe. She takes up the phone in the bedroom and there listens while Zooey disguised as Buddy tries to make talk and defend himself. The upturn of this discussion comes when she realizes that Zooey is speaking. Zooey, now desperate and inspired, reassures her about her praying but tells her that the phoniness of the world is none of her concern. She must keep her own standards in spite of it. She must do her best for the Fat Lady—Seymour's term in radio days for the audience, invisible, doubtless horrible, and yet completely dependent. Actually Zooey continues with rising pitch, the Fat Lady is everyone. And he concludes with the revelation. "Don't you know who that Fat Lady really is?" he demands of Franny. "Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy."

Franny is overjoyed at the revelation. Peace comes to her in a moment. She gets into her parents' bed and smiles quietly just before falling asleep.

There is the message, the answer to Franny's question. The false is finally just as true as the true because God is everywhere, in everything. The phoney and the genuine equally deserve our love because God manifests himself in both. All must be good and true, if not always beautiful.

It is even possible, though guesses are risky, that this is the answer to Salinger's own question too. He would not be the first author to work through his problems by way of his poetry or prose. The rumors of Salinger's troubled emotional life have been widespread. It may be that here we have his personal Pilgrim's progress, for the distance between the end of "Franny" and the end of "Zooey" is substantial. Salinger finished "Franny" with a spasm of quiet hate; Lane Coutell leaves looking even more detestable than when he entered. As he goes, it is hinted that he is as gross and persistent in his loving as in his eating. He hasn't been alone with Franny for a month. He shakes his head. "That's no good. Too goddam long between drinks. To put it crassly." However, by the time we reach the last page of "Zooey" this perfectly specific manifestation of hate has turned to a message of universal love. "There isn't anyone anywhere," Zooey proclaims to Franny, "that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady." That, presumably, includes even Lane Coutell. The hate of "Franny" is gone; the love of "Zooey" prevails. And Salinger may have worked out his own solution and reached the same answer, his own answer, even if he may not yet be sleeping as quietly as Franny.