[In the following essay, Kirkwood offers a laudatory review of Franny and Zooey.]

In common with the rest of the literate world one finds oneself in considerable awe of J. D. Salinger's power to transmit so eloquently the mood of the modern intellectual dilemma and to transmute it into such intensely moving stories as Franny and Zooey.

The artfully deliberate accumulation of detail, the cinematic selection of props in the scene, the apparently endless tangents of talk diverging in all directions are drawn together so tautly that in the end we begin to feel that we too shall choke, along with his characters, on the very stench of too much self-consciousness.

The two stories in this book have already appeared in the New Yorker and are part of the Glass family saga appearing at intervals in that publication in the form of very long short stories. This time the two main characters are the famous Seymour's youngest brother and sister, two more of the erstwhile Quiz Kids.

In the first story Franny, twenty years old and beset by overwhelming spiritual woes, meets her conventional "young man" for an eastern college football week-end. Lane Coutell has all his outer trappings in order and his conversation is studded with the meaningless cliches which pass for ideas among his ilk; he is callowness personified. Franny's mother Bessie says, "He's very sweet and he's worried about Franny," and Zooey replies, "He's not sweet at all. He's a charm boy and a fake. . . . Listen, I talked with him for twenty goddam minutes one night while Franny was getting ready to go out, and I say he's a big nothing."

Franny, on the verge of breakdown, is made physically sick by all his superficial slickness and by the gulf between herself and him, widening to a pit which threatens to separate her from all her contemporaries and from her college life. She leaves school and comes home to the family in their New York apartment. As E. M. Forster would have it, Franny does not "connect."

Enter Zooey, at the beginning of the second story to comfort her and try to help her at his mother's request and in his own fabulous fashion. Much of the substance of this second much longer story is the meandering but ever tightening monologue by means of which he tries to save her from herself and restore her sense of proportion, groping for the method as he proceeds. In reality it is a sermon delivered by a chain-smoking Shelley Berman type with all the intensity of Salinger's virtuoso style. This inspired harangue compounded of clever colloquiallisms, humour and loving kindness of a desperate order, is truly a remarkable tour de force of writing. Though its smattering of assorted religious reference becomes more than a little coy at times as in the case of the "Jesus prayer" the whole rings with honest self-doubt striving for conviction, and of course with the effort to get through, for Franny is being saved by means of a very verbal life belt, created and tossed to her by Zooey on the spot as it were.

This sort of effort is enacted between Bessie and Zooey on a delightful level of comedy in the opening bathroom scene, where the mother has cornered her son. Their talk is luminous with vitality and with the pleasure of the participants in their verbal skirmish.

Salinger's writing is unique and justly celebrated. It is, in spite of the brilliance of its current idiom, much more than a vogue, but at the heart of it there is a peculiar emptiness. Bessie is of the new generation of mothers in the American fiction. She is loving, befuddled, with a great impact on her sons and no means of communicating with her daughters. The children are extra sensitive, extraordinarily bright, and suffer accordingly in contact with the average. But they all live in a vacuum. In essence, Salinger's message seems to be the same as Forster's so differently delivered "only connect". In all the miles of Glass family prose, no one ever does.