Since I have encouraged everyone I know to go back and re-read the books they were younger, my Rock & Roll Bookclub chose J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey for our May read. It is one of my sister Ericka’s favorite books. I’m not entirely sure why, especially when you consider she’s a pretty devout Atheist. I’ve developed a theory, or rather am developing it as these letters fall from my keyboard that Ericka’s affection for this book is due, in large part, to her affection for Salinger’s writing and that Salinger’s obvious affection for the Glass family (Franny and Zooey are Glasses) has spilled on to her. Affection my osmosis, so to speak.

I do not have the same affection. Franny and Zooey, originally published in book-form in 1961 after appearing as stories in The New Yorker in the mid50s, is about the fabulous Glass family and young Franny’s existential crisis. Yawn.

Call me a heretic, but two-hundred pages of people talking gets to be a drag after about 100 pages. I was with Salinger during “Franny” while she has a bit of nervous breakdown that may or may not be influenced by (what seemed to me obvious) an unplanned pregnancy. Franny’s at lunch with her boyfriend Lane an Ivy-leaguer/pompous blowhard who spends the meal yammering on about how brilliant he is. Franny will have none of it and tears into his egocentric phony bullshit. It’s pretty awesome. Besides that, there’s all the delicious 50s-ness of the story and the smoking and the three martini lunch. Franny’s a-okay in my book.

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