[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 settlers in 20th-century New York, the Glasses.' It doesn't matter that other fragments of the big unrealized novel are already in print, nor that if the Glass saga ever gets written it may not contain these bits in their present form. Does it matter that "Zooey," the longer and more ambitious of the stories, is an almost total disaster? It should, for the audience is deeply involved in it.

Salinger, if we may for a moment peer through the novelist to the guru underneath, is against all forms of wanting and hankering; he condemns the sort of religion that is eternity-acquisitive, and the sort of humanity that is culture-acquisitive, desiring to know, for the prestige of knowing, about Homer and Blake and Zen. And Salinger. For the really queer thing about this writer is that he very carefully writes for an audience he deplores, an audience that disposes of a certain amount of smart cultural information and reacts correctly to fairly complex literary stimuli: an audience that is familiar with Creative Writing, and has a strong stiffening of people who have turned in pretty good papers on Flaubert or Faulkner. Or Salinger. Now this audience is, under one aspect, precisely what makes the world so dreadful for Salinger's Wise Children, so they have nervous breakdowns from contact with it. But under another, it is what you have to have if you play the piano or write books or act. It doesn't know, as the Wise Children do, the difference between wisdom and knowledge; you may be acting perfectly, as a saint prays, but there will still be 'unskilled laughter coming from the fifth row.' And yet even if you're God's actress' you can't get along without an audience. So what you do is to work through a whimsical sorites and come out calling the audience Christ, even the lout in the fifth row. Salinger can thus exercise his art with reverence, while still despising the 'culture' which makes it possible.

I do not mean to make this sound repulsive, but the truth is that the position could not be maintained if the audience were either stupid or holy: it has to be smart, and the novelist counts heavily on that. The art which has so much to say against culture-acquisitiveness really depends on it, and a lot of Salingerian legerdemain is devoted to concealing this fact. The epigraph of "For Esme with Love and Squalor" is a Zen koan: 'We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?' A brutal, occidental answer might be: Salinger without a culture-acquisitive audience. The mythical Fat Lady—the Glasses invent her as an excuse for giving good performances to stupid audiences, but really despise her ('very thick legs, very veiny . . . She had cancer, too')—has to provide the other hand.

The Irish-Jewish Glass family consists of nice ex-vaudeville parents and seven fantastic children, two of whom, as in 'We Are Seven,' are dead. These children all appeared at one time or another on a radio-show called It's a Wise Child—based on the Quiz Kids of history. They all know a lot, especially about the importance of unknowing, and when they grow up they are still in this respect entitled to be called Wise Children (another reason, sympathetically suggested by Leslie Fiedler in his superb Partisan Review notice of this book, is that Salinger really thinks they're a lot of little bastards. This is a good example of the way Salinger attracts benevolent interpretations). Wisdom, Yeats remarked, is a property of the dead, a something incompatible with life; and the Glasses find it so. Seymour, the venerated eldest brother, committed suicide in the ravishingly written story, 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish.' Another brother is dead, another a Jesuit; a sister is married, and Buddy, the next best counsellor to Seymour, inaccessible. That leaves Franny and Zooey, with Franny in a religious crisis.

"Franny" has her breaking down at lunch with an oafishly cultured Ivy League date and it is irreproachably written. "Zooey" shows her back home in the big New York apartment, an amusingly furnished womb, a cosy place for a breakdown. Mother Bessie is in attendance, and there are 'hot and cold running ghosts', especially Seymour, whose private telephone is still listed, and whose room is unchanged. But housepainters stand outside the door waiting for Franny to move out; and Zooey, in his anxiety, can only talk the author's customary desperate whimsy.

Franny's crisis is big and worrying, but pretty typical, one feels, of the Glass children; it has to do with the phoneyness of the world they grow up into, full of boyfriends discussing football, Flaubert, life. She has become obsessed with 'the Jesus prayer'—a formula by which you pray incessantly. This seems wise, but it drives her to the edge of breakdown. She wants to talk to Seymour, but Seymour is dead (Holden Caulfield had similar trouble). Buddy is away, Bessie, her mother, offers homely advice and chicken soup. It is up to Zooey to save her from the psychiatrists who might make her want to live in the world she now rejects; sweating with love, he does so (it almost, but subtly not quite, involves an impersonation of Seymour). Franny accepts his advice. It is sort of religious, and also involves acting in the world as it is. The religion Salinger has to sell to his culture-acquisitive audience; the need for action he has to sell to himself. This explains the method of the book.

Signs that there is a method are characteristically minimized; there is a lot of carefully planned improvisation. Essential information about the book is wrapped round it in a blurb or given with an air of inevitable clumsiness in a footnote (footnotes are called an 'aesthetic evil'). Buddy Glass, the narrator, takes a deal of space to explain why the book is so randomly shaped. Zooey, we hear, dislikes his brother's handling of the narrative, and, according to Buddy, further complains

that the plot hinges on mysticism . . . which . . . can only expedite, move up, the day and hour of my professional undoing. People are already shaking their heads over me, and any immediate further professional use of the word 'God', except as a familiar, healthy American expletive, will be taken . . . as the worst kind of name-dropping and a sure sign that I'm going straight to the dogs.

In case we don't find this sufficiently disarming, we are encouraged to believe that Zooey, in voicing these forbidden thoughts, is merely providing another example of the off-beat loving which goes on in the Glass family. The fact that it is Zooey who is voicing them is meant to prevent us from doing so. The same sort of endearing duplicity is involved in Buddy's apology for the endless talking that goes on in the book: that's the way it was, you can't change the Glasses. Buddy also has tricks that allow him to speak frankly of Zooey's incredible beauty, or rather the 'authentic esprit' of his face: a bit embarrassing, but that's the way it is. He is even capable of a parenthesis stating that 'all this data is, I think, to some degree relevant.'

The author knows the public knows he isn't clumsy; but just in case anybody thinks he's really slipped into awkward simplicity there is the television script Zooey is reading, a piece that 'stinks of courage and integrity.' 'It's down-to-earth, it's simple, it's untrue.' This is to prevent anybody using such words of "Zooey"; yet, all this legerdemain apart, they apply. So let us use such words: when the fog of technique and comparative religion clears away. "Zooey" is simple (it says, with Carlyle, 'Do the work that lies nearest to thee') and untrue.

It should in justice be said that he succeeds in all sorts of ways: with Bessie Glass, in the protracted, funny, yet economical bathroom scene that takes up half the book; with Zooey's droll, teasing ways. But not with Bessie as the priestess of the Fat Lady's altar, not with Zooey as the book of the dead. Buddy's enormous, apparently amorphous letter, which Zooey reads through as a preparation, saved Zooey years before, and provides the pattern for the saving of Franny: neat, and in some Salingerian sense true. But the treasured wisdom of Seymour about 'unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night' had to be mediated to Buddy by a little girl in a supermarket who says her boyfriends are called Bobby and Dorothy; a similar angel passes before Zooey's eyes as he works on Franny. The missions of these girls (and of the one in 'Bananafish') may be to play tiny Iphigenia to adolescent Orestes—as Fiedler observes; but their message is death or nirvana, and for Buddy and Zooey to interpret it as a call to action in 'this goddam phenomenal world' seems false both to Salinger and the audience.

This is really the crux. Franny has got this Jesus prayer wrong: Zooey has to straighten her out. First he tries to show her she's wrong about Jesus, who was extremely tough and intelligent, a cobra not a bunny, as she seems to think. This fails; when he succeeds (under terrific emotional pressure) he does it by using Seymour's telephone; first pretending to be Buddy then not quite pretending (even Salinger couldn't quite try that) to be Seymour. What he says on the phone will keep the explicators happy for ages, since it turns on a pun: Zooey is an actor; Franny could be. Von Hügel called prayer an 'ever-increasing predominance of Action over activity,' and Zooey has a similar notion in mind, perhaps (not that I understand Von Hügel's remark). Franny is well-informed on religion, and he doesn't have to spell it out. She must act. It seems that acting is Franny's karma; she must be God's actress, and that will be her Jesus prayer. If it seems strange to be saying a Jesus prayer to a lot of louts in a theatre, she is to remember that they're all Christ. Franny, restored, happy and self-controlled, drops into a calm sleep.

It is to make us accept this conclusion that Salinger has worked so deviously. And, as one of his admiring audience, I find it hard to believe he could be selling anything so simple and untrue. The wise child would certainly have discounted this effort of Zooey's as a last desperate attempt to save her from the professional headshrinker. Salinger has at last overestimated his rhetorical control over us. When Bessie's chicken soup turns out to be eucharistic, like the colonel's hash in Mary McCarthy's diatribe against Creative Writing courses, we feel let down. When Zooey's exhausting effort to save Franny's life and wisdom comes down to a trouper's advice to go out there and wow them, we know that Salinger's exhausting effort to satisfy us and himself has failed. He cannot, for all his skill, make it appear that a good performance as Pegeen Mike in The Playboy is an adequate substitute for being dead.

The author of "Zooey," a work designed with extraordinary care and even a kind of passion, is certainly a master of sorts. Perhaps he's grown too fond of Seymour, perhaps he's been over-subtle about his audience. For whatever reason, he has slipped badly, and "Zooey" doesn't work. The Fat Lady, obstinately unholy, doesn't move a muscle; the artist's single hand silently beats the air.