[In the following negative review of Franny and Zooey, Didion discusses the didactic quality of Salinger's prose.]

When I first came to New York during the fall of 1956, I went to a party on Bank Street which I remember with particular clarity for a number of reasons, not the least of them my surprise that no one present wished William Knowland were running for President. (I had only been in New York a few days, and the notion that Democrats might be people one met at parties had not yet violated what must have been, in retrospect, my almost impenetrable western innocence.) There were a couple of girls who "did something interesting" for Mademoiselle and there were several rather tweedy graduate students from Princeton, one of whom intimated that he had a direct wire to the PMLA, baby; there was, as well, a stunningly predictable Sarah Lawrence girl who tried to engage me in a discussion of J. D. Salinger's relationship to Zen. When I seemed unresponsive, she lapsed into language she thought I might comprehend: Salinger was, she declared, the single person in the world capable of understanding her.

Five years work certain subtle changes. I have become downright blasé about Democrats at parties; that particular Sarah Lawrence girl found that she could, after all, be understood well enough for everyday purposes by someone else, an electronics engineer; and nobody, not even on Bank Street, thinks much any more about Adlai Stevenson for President.

The idea that J. D. Salinger is a kind of middle-class American guru, however, has somehow resisted those gently abrasive sands. Among the reasonably literate young and young in heart, he is surely the most read and reread writer in America today, exerting a power over his readers which is in some ways extra-literary. Those readers expect him to teach them something, something that has nothing at all to do with fiction. Not only have his vague metaphysical hints been committed to rote by New Yorker readers from here to Dubuque, but his imaginary playmates, the Glass family, have achieved a kind of independent existence; I rather imagine that Salinger readers wish secretly that they could write letters to Franny and Zooey and their brother Buddy, and maybe even to Waker (who is a Jesuit and apparently less disturbed than his kin), much as people of less invincible urbanity write letters to the characters in As the World Turns and The Brighter Day.

What actually happens in Franny and Zooey, the two Glass family novelettes published this fall, is really nothing much. In "Franny," Franny Glass arrives at Princeton for a football weekend and is met by her date, strictly another of those boys with a direct wire to the PMLA, baby. He has frogs' legs for lunch and talks about Flaubert, all of which gets on Franny's nerves, especially because all she wants to do at the moment is say something called "The Jesus Prayer." ("The thing is," she explains, "the marvellous thing is, when you first start doing it, you don't even have to have faith in what you're doing . . . then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while.")

When her date somehow fails to get the point about the Jesus Prayer, Franny faints. In "Zooey," which picks up the action the next morning, we find Franny laid up at home on East 79th Street with what her brother, a television actor named Zooey, calls "a tenth-rate nervous breakdown." She is tired of everybody's ego, not excepting her own. ("Just because I'm choosy about what I want—in this case, enlightfenment, or peace, instead of money or prestige or fame or any of those things—doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else.") Zooey eventually effects a cure of sorts by convincing Franny that everybody out there—no matter how given to ego, to eating frogs' legs and "name-dropping in a terribly quiet, casual voice" and wanting "to get somewhere"—is "Christ himself. Christ himself, buddy." ("Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet?")

To anyone who has ever felt overexposed to the world, to anyone who has ever harbored hatred in his or her heart toward droppers of names, writers of papers on Flaubert, toward eaters of frogs' legs, all of this has a certain seductive lure; there is a kind of lulling charm in being assured in that dazzling Salinger prose, that one's raw nerves, one's urban hangover, one's very horridness, is really not horridness at all but instead a kind of dark night of the soul; there is something very attractive about being told that one finds en-lightenment or peace by something as eminently within the realm of the possible as tolerance toward television writers and section men, that one can find the peace which passeth understanding simply by looking for Christ in one's date for the Yale game.

However brilliantly rendered (and it is), however hauntingly right in the rhythm of its dialogue (and it is), Franny and Zooey is finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger's tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living. What gives the book its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.