Just not my taste

Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger (Little, Brown, 1961)

I've been doing things like re-reading Emma and find other ways to play with my Kindle. And that's gotten in the way of reading books that could really appear on this blog. But then I returned to Salinger.

I guess these are two short (long?) stories that form a sort of novella. And early in the first, about Franny, I could see why Catcher in the Rye works so well in high school. For all I hated that book, Salinger writes in a highly readable style. The pages turn quickly, and such was the case here. He does an excellent job of painting the moneyed classes, with their clothing and rituals and manners of speech. And then places black sheep within them, who can call out their hypocrisy and phoniness and just generally complain. In the case of Franny Glass, this crisis takes the form of a nervous breakdown; for brother Zooey, it's some sort of complaint both about the ridiculous world around him and of the melodrama of his sister's response.

Or something. I'm really open to the idea that I'm getting Salinger wrong. Maybe it comes from the same well from which springs the truism that we most dislike in others that which we abhor in ourselves? Perhaps my complete and total impatience with the ways in which Salinger's protagonists place themselves apart and somehow better than those around them comes from the fact that I do the same. Maybe I see too much of myself in Holden and Franny, and I don't like what I see.

Or maybe not. So that's the thing I give Salinger. I remain annoyed when reading him, and haven't grown out of that teenage pique, but by provoking that response he also inspires a lot of introspection. The struggle to figure out what I don't like is almost more valuable as an exercise merely reading a book I enjoyed.