[In the following excerpt, Daniels perceives Zooey as one of Salinger's most complex and complete characters.]

Reading first a novel like Malamud's [A New Life], and turning then to Salinger's Franny and Zooey is almost bound to make a reader feel acute regrets at both sorts, I think. The writers of scope and breadth and open-end optimism (if that is what it's called) have left such gaps, such hollow centers; have contrived to emote about such public yet simultaneously nonobjective emotions; and have managed finally through their abuses to make of Compassion and Optimism stale jokes. So I think we feel (if stock characters and gestures in modern fiction have not too hopelessly dulled us) an enormous gratitude to Salinger for reminding us that characters in fiction can even now respond to, react against, agonize in their worlds in perfectly private, and still perfectly meaningful and relevant ways. And when the mystical Salinger can so often control his action with an almost eerie precision and intelligence it makes "us" feel that here is a genuine artist.

My own grudge against Salinger must stem from his being so clearly one of the two or three best writers to come along in the last decade. And I suppose that if the writers of breadth and scope were doing their jobs adequately it would seem more than enough for Salinger to tend his own garden and sound his own depth, and take his proper place as an incredibly fine minor writer. But really nobody seems to believe that Salinger, from present-day perspective, is fine and minor. His attackers are much too vehement, much too anxious to assert how slick, New Yorker-ish, phoney he is, how precociously tiresome his quiz kids are, to completely believe it. And what he most conspicuously shares with minor writers everywhere is a dreadful coterie. But the stupid truth is that I wish J. D. Salinger were trying something more reckless, more probing, more earnestly comprehensive than he is trying—and thinking of Salinger all of those words, of course, ring back comically.

But to take Franny and Zooey on its own terms: the problem is serious and difficult enough. Neither, Zooey no more than Franny, is sure whether being or not being is nobler in worlds where "ego, ego, ego" motivates all and where nothing is done purely, for the love of the act itself. "You sure," queries Franny's date, Lane Coutell, with the "studied quietness" of the man who knows his psychiatry as well as his snails and frogs' legs, "you're not just afraid of competing?" And of course Franny's fear is that she will compete. She temporarily chooses, like most of the Glasses before her, retreat. The retreats from ego into detachment are various: but whether it is Franny devoting herself to writing papers on Restoration Comedy, Waker becoming a priest, or Buddy secluding himself in his writer's shack, the goals are the same—"desirelessness," "cessation from all hankerings," the spirit of the Four Vows, and a 'return' in some way to the Non-Knowledge, the first knowledge, that their mentor Seymour taught them as Wise Children.

When Franny Glass, caught between Desirelessness and her natural hankerings, between Detachment and her vital concerns with life, and consequently reduced to a horrible "destructiveness" (all of course perfectly apt criticism of her collegiate world) cracks and returns to the Glass sanctuary, it is Zooey's task to teach her—and convince himself—that she, and he, are born for engagement with the world, for action, for, explicitly, acting. To do this he assumes Buddy's older-brother tones on Seymour's still connected phone until Franny catches him out in a temporary lapse from his role. So it is as his own person he preaches his message:

" . . . The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. . . . You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world. . . . I used to worry about that. I don't worry about it much any more. At least I'm still in love with Yorick's skull. I want an honorable goddam skull when I'm dead, buddy. I hanker after an honorable goddam skull like Yorick's. And so do you, Franny Glass. So do you, so do you. . . ."

Unlike the traditionally constructed, beautifully implicit "Franny" (or "A Great Day for Banana Fish"), "Zooey" is one of Salinger's explicit and expository rambles ("a sort of prose home movie"), a difference which is in its modest way an upholding of distinctions between tragedy and comedy. And Buddy Glass's introduction tells us that a happy ending of sorts has been achieved: the tale has been told (in "hideously spaced installments" and "harrowingly private sittings"); the leading characters' criticisms and judgments of the story are in (Bessie Glass, "a svelte twilight soubrette," objects to being on display in her old housecoat, Franny to the indignity of a protracted nose-blowing scene, and Zooey to a plot hinging on "religious mystification"). Detachment of a sort, then, has come to all the leading characters in the drama. There is of course the qualifying fact that this is Buddy Glass's rendition—"cleverness [is] my permanent affliction, my wooden leg"—and that Zooey's story might well seem to begin where "Zooey" ends.

Because Zooey, it seems to me, is the Glass kid who has most slipped Buddy Glass's benign, tender reins, and even, to an extent, Salinger's. "Zooey" is about how Zooey performs his ablutions and girds himself to play first the role of analyst, which he hates, and then seer, which he fears, for Franny's sake. Zooey was "the only one" (to quote Buddy again, who is quoting Waker) "who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him." It is Zooey who respects Jesus for what he was and not as "St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all in one." And in his opinion, "if you really want to know, half the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren't using their true egos. . . . The thing you think is [Professor Tupper's] ego isn't his ego at all but some other, much dirtier, much less basic faculty." As a Glass among Glasses, Zooey is the one who most tenaciously resists the tendency to let cleverness do the work of just criticism and whimsy take the place of just valuation.

His reasons for valuing people are the characteristic Glass reasons: but whereas Seymour is recalled for his haiku poem about the little girl who turned her doll's head to look at him on the plane to Florida, whereas Buddy's special vision of love on earth is the small girl in the meat market who tells him her boy friends are named Dorothy and Bobby, Zooey can discover these same manifestations of reality merged and blended out of love in the adult world of fakery and distorted ego—in LeSage, the absurd producer, who cautions people not to be too shocked at his wife's being a dead ringer for "the late Carole Lombard, in the movies"; and in Dick Hess, the T.V. writer of "bogus-courageous, 'offbeat' talent," whose first play features a homesick farm boy who gets run-over, stampeded, pursuing a car which has changed for him into a cow. But while Zooey can feel a genuine sympathy and affection for these men, he does not respect them.

His final terrible effort on Franny's behalf is to preach the message over Seymour's phone that Jesus, the person he most respects ("the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master"), merges and blends with Seymour's Fat Lady, the Fat Lady in the Wise Child audience for whom Seymour used to enjoin them to shine their shoes and perform with love: ". . . Don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy." After this effort he hangs up the phone, exhausted. His morning with Bessie and Franny has been one of religious preparation and religious ordeal, and—not that Seymour or Buddy would take exception to his message—his final plea for participation in life echoes against Seymour's ghost and Yorick's skull, and his own unsentimental intelligence, as well as most of his own instincts.

Its willed transcendence echoes also against Bessie's lovely common sense at the beginning:

". . . It just so happens, young man, that I don't consider your little sister in exactly the same light that I do the Lord. I may be peculiar, but I don't happen to. I don't happen to see any comparison whatsoever between the Lord and a run-down, overwrought little college girl that's been reading too many religious books and all like that! . . ."

There is not, of course, a real question of whether the reader is able to 'participate' in "Zooey"'s conclusion. It strikes me as a very literary ending, and you'd have to be, in Zooey's earlier words, "either a very simple person, like the pilgrim, or a very goddam desperate person" to experience it. But that's not really the point. Zooey's point is that even as acts of love transform themselves into religious rites, just as importantly and with much more difficulty, religious truths must translate themselves into actions of love. It is much harder to turn Christ into the Fat Lady than it is to turn a car into Dick Hess's sacred cow, or Bessie's chicken soup into consecrated broth. But it, too, must be done.

The Glass children inhabit, as do the characters of Buddy Glass's adolescent idol Scott Fitzgerald, a fairly impeccable and sophisticated in-group world. One wonderful difference is that while Fitzgerald's main characters work very hard to either crash into or create their in-groups before disillusion sets in, the Glass children are just naturally at the very center of theirs, and most of their acquaintances wait tensely but usually humbly for the Glasses' penetrating critiques. Even Lane Coutell, though he is about Franny's age, remembers the Wise Child programs well enough to make knowing comparisons between Franny and Zooey as performers. The only social worry Franny and Zooey seem to experience is caused by their penchant for dashing their friends' spirits and egos. Franny "would in all probability one day marry a man with a hacking cough" we are told. But how can we believe it? Surely there are some boys in the ivy league with the makings of hacking coughs. How are we to understand Franny, with that "goddam Bide-a-Wee Home heart of hers," not just casually dating but apparently having an affair with Lane Coutell? How should we understand the Glasses' capacity to become so heated up about the pretensions and affectations of the trivial people of their world? Zooey of course recognizes the inappropriateness of such homicidal intensity on Franny's part. But his advice—"It would be all right, in a way, if you thought [Professor Tupper's] personal affectations were sort of funny. Or if you felt a tiny bit sorry for him for being insecure enough to give himself a little pathetic goddam glamour"—if it rises above social oneupsmanship to the level of manners, still hardly confronts the state of Franny's soul or his own.

For me, Salinger looks most like a 'major writer' in those moments when he creates, as he surely does, an almost unbearable pressure between the dark upsurgings of his characters' despair, and the tight lid of humor, wit, whimsy, yes and sentimentality, which is, through tremendous efforts, just held down. In "Zooey" there are the beginnings, the makings, of a 'major character': Zooey, after all, shares his surface exuberance, his robust, often cruel humor, and the underlying scent of death, sexual neurosis, and the horror of his appointed task traditionally enough with Hamlet and Melville's Pierre. But our final impression of the Glass kids is not that at all—due in large part to the fact that Salinger (or Buddy Glass?) does not want that to be anything like our final impression. It is the business of fairy godmothers to grant children beauty, brilliance, charm, vitality, and, miraculously, souls generous enough to accommodate all the rest. But it is an author's business to scrutinize such monsters for their real—not their heroic, not their endearing—flaws and failings, at least to the extent that he scrutinizes the flaws of the world they are caught in. Or are they, like Christ, to become the Fat Lady sheerly through love?