Franny and Zooey -- Final Thoughts

While I pretty much hated Franny and Zooey and never want to read any more Salinger, there were a few flashes of writing which perfectly encapsulate the tedium of the entire book which seem worth sharing.  Brace yourself.

From the third page, where Zooey is talking about the story he's about to tell:

"The plot line itself, to finish up, is largely the result of a rather unholy collaborative effort.  Almost all the facts to follow (slowly, calmly to follow) were originally given to me in hideously spaced installments, and in, to me, somewhat harrowingly private sittings, by the three player-characters themselves.  Not one of the three, I might well add, showed any noticeably soaring talent for brevity of detail or compression of incident.  A shortcoming, I'm afraid, that will be carried over to this, the final, or shooting version.  I can't excuse it, regrettably, but I insist on trying to explain it.  We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle."

Well, can't say he didn't warn me.

Behold the Henry Jamesian length of this sentence:

"Where once, a few years earlier, her eyes alone could break the news (either to people or to bathmats) that two of her sons were dead, one by suicide (her favorite, her most intricately calibrated, her kindest son), and one killed in World War II (her only truly lighthearted son) -- where once Bessie Glass's eyes alone could report these facts, with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail that neither her husband nor any of her adult surviving children could bear to look at, let alone take in, now, in 1955, she was apt to use this same terrible Celtic equipment to break the news, usually at the front door, that the new delivery boy hadn't brought the leg of lamb in time for dinner or that some remote Hollywood starlet's marriage was on the rocks."

Zooey talking to Franny:

"'On top of everything else,' he said immediately, 'we've got "Wise Child" complexes.  We've never really got off the goddam air.  Not one of us.  We don't talk, we hold forth.  We don't converse, we expound.  At least I do.  The minute I'm in a room with somebody who has the usual number of ears, I either turn into a goddam seer or a human hatpin.  The Prince of Bores."

You could say that again.  And in fact, he probably did, in each of the next several sentences.