Franny and Zooey

I haven't read anything of Salinger's for over a year now, and the wait was certainly worth it. The Catcher in the Rye is my favorite book, and here i find some similarities. namely his style of writing.

Franny and Zooey is a novel (or novella, in my opinion) composed of two short stories, centered around two siblings of the Glass family. Franny, the first story, follows a scene surrounding the youngest sibling and Lane, her college boyfriend. In my opinion, this is the better story of the two. Anyways, Franny shows up at the station and goes to the diner to eat, but acts sick or on the verge of death. she carries around some little book with her that could possibly be the result of her acting strange. the reason i like this portion is because it is fairly short, and is a prime example of Salinger's simplistic writing style with unique young adult characters.

Zooey, however, is a different story. His (yea, i thought it was a girl too) portion of the book is very long and somewhat drawn out. Zooey is like an older Holden Caulfield, with that arrogance, disrespect, and habit of smoking. he disrespects his parents (and siblings) and tries to get to the bottom of this book that Franny is reading. apparently, the Glass children were very promising and intelligent, until each went their own separate ways. one died in a war, one committed suicide. all in all, it is a very Royal Tenenbaums-esque background.

don't get me wrong, Zooey still has that Salinger style, but it's a little more drawn out and slow paced than Franny. Zooey is also about 160 pages, compared to Franny's 40.