Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

I've always enjoyed J.D. Salinger's only novel, The Catcher in the Rye; I've read it enough times now that I've lost count. Given the author's death on Jan. 27, I'll probably read it again soon. But it is not my favorite Salinger work. That honor goes to Franny and Zooey, and I write this knowing quite well what a strange little book it is. It was cobbled together from a short story (that would be "Franny") and a novella ("Zooey"), both of which had appeared in the 1950s in The New Yorker magazine. Upon assembling it, Salinger even felt compelled to begin the book with a humorous little apology to his editor, asking him "to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book." Yet it reads like a novel, or at least I think so -- and keep in mind that when it comes to J.D. Salinger, readers tend to have very strong opinions of his books. Franny and Zooey prominently features the two youngest members of the Glass family; Salinger wrote about this oddball group in several works. The results (again, it's just my opinion) eventually became highly ornamented and somewhat annoying, resulting in a book with the dubious title Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. But with Franny and Zooey, Salinger was still on his game. It's a book laced with humor but also considerable pathos. As always, the Glass children are too brilliant for their own good; Franny, in particular, grapples here with a religious idea that becomes fixation that becomes obsession. The Glass children also are a bit too brilliant, too sensitive, too amazing to be entirely believable ... but isn't that part of the point of fiction? To create characters, situations, places that can be far above the ordinary -- for after all, it is the extraordinary that fires our imaginations.