J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [184]
Poore’s review was the exception. Most critics derided the book. They attacked it in sections, segmenting it between its two parts, usually praising “Franny” for its characterization, tone, and structure while belittling “Zooey” for its religiosity, formlessness, extreme length, and (most damning of all) Salinger’s obvious indulgence of his characters, charging that it denied Zooey any hint of reality. In short, “Zooey” especially was loudly subjected to the same litany of criticism on a national scale that it had suffered in the editorial offices of The New Yorker in whispers.
What most critics dispensed was not a review of the merits of the new book but a public rebuke of the author. The sullen resentment of critics, held at bay for years while Salinger grew increasingly famous, suddenly exploded. Some reviews were blatantly vicious, others timid in their condemnation. But none matched the insight of Norman Mailer in 1959 when he voiced the suspicion that such criticism of Salinger’s work (and success) “may come from nothing more graceful than envy.”18
Aside from Salinger and his characters, a favorite target of critical attack was Salinger’s readers, who were perceived to be young, upper middle class, and educated to the point of boredom. In his review for The Atlantic Monthly, Alfred Kazin appeared to blame Salinger for catering to the self-consciousness of such readers, while deftly intimating that profit was the goal of his manipulations. “Salinger’s vast public,” he opined, “… think of themselves as endlessly sensitive, spiritually alone, gifted, and whose suffering lies in the narrowing of their consciousness to themselves, … in the drying up of their hope, their trust, and their wonder in the great world itself.”19 Other critics agreed. In National Review, Joan Didion charged Salinger with the “tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers,” and condemned “his predilection for giving instructions for living.”20
Perhaps the most important and subsequently famous critique of Franny and Zooey was written by the novelist John Updike and appeared in the Sunday New York Times Book Review on September 17.* Updike had always revered Salinger and cherished his works. Yet he too fell into line with the storm of critical fury. Updike’s criticism was muted and somewhat apologetic. It still reads with the embarrassed tone of a young man asking to be repaid a few dollars by an old teacher who had once lent him a fortune without expecting to be repaid.
Regardless of its self-conscious nature, Updike’s review remains a superb example of the faults that most critics found with Franny and Zooey. Though he excused the stories separately, he felt that together they “distinctly jangle as components of one book.”* Comparing the Franny character of the first story with the Franny of “Zooey,” it became clear that Updike, like most critics, favored the shorter story over the longer. To Updike, “Franny” took place in a world that he easily recognized, while “Zooey” appeared to occur in a dreamworld: a haunted apartment where Franny somehow finds consolation through a dialogue that Updike found meandering and “condescending.”
Updike criticized the Glass characters as a concept—in essence questioning the direction of Salinger’s authorship. The Glass children were too beautiful, too intelligent, and too enlightened, he said, and Salinger loved them too deeply. “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them,” he grieved (mimicking Seymour