Franny and Zooey

I thought that these characters were all intellect, no depth. Zooey's verbal tics are fantastically 'goddamn' irritating. Nobody listens to each other in this book. That may be realistic but it's painful to read. I've never met real people who are anywhere near as pretentious as Zooey. He strikes me as a kind of hyper-real charicature of the New York Jewish intelligentsia.
And I thought the mother was almost a cliche - the whining, dumb mother of geniuses. She has her moments - thank God - where Salinger imbues her with a little more nuance and intelligence but, generally, it doesn't seem possible that she is the mother of her children - her lack of understanding is so great. I did quite like Franny but, she gets pushed out of the book by Zooey's wanky self-important ranting. In fact, I loved the opening section - the Franny bit. There was something beautiful and sad about her realisation that as you say "she's better than the company she keeps." But then the second part is far too long. It's all bluster and showing-off (not just Zooey but, by implication, Salinger) and I was so, so disappointed.

Joe

I'm shocked - shocked, I tell you - that you didn't like any of the characters. I thought Bessie (the mother) was wonderful, and really sympathetically portrayed as the long-suffering parent of the Glass family wunderkinds - the way she responds to Zooey's half-serious bullying is amazingly well-observed. To my mind the depth of the relationships between the various members of the Glass family make them arugably the best family ever captured in fiction.
I think a novel either gets you or it doesn't, so I'm not about to tick you off for not liking the characters, but I think Franny and Zooey does a superb job of making the reader empathise with the Glass kids without being saccharine or false. Zooey's this immensely intelligent, astute, witty guy who for all that isn't terribly happy; his sister's a society girl who's discovering she's better than the company she keeps - like Holden Caulfield, (who Buddy Glass - the narrator - later insists is not a thinly-veiled portrayal of his brother Seymour, despite speculation from his fictional audience) she's starting to feel that much of high society is comprised of phoneys.
But Franny and Zooey goes much further than simply revisting the territory of Catcher In The Rye - for all his bluster, Zooey is bang on the money when he takes Franny to task over her casual dismissal of her professors. Just like Holden, she makes it 'too damn personal'. Yes, her professor might fix his hair in the mirror before he takes a class, but that's none of her 'goddamn business'.
So anyway - I don't think one can ever mount a truly rational, objective defence of a work of literature, but I think Franny and Zooey is beautiful and awesome. Possibly my favourite book ever.

Yes. I enjoyed it, but only a technical level. Both Franny and especially Zooey are pretty hateable. The mother is dreadful. Some of the physical observation is astonishing but, by the end of this book, I didn't give a toss about the characters.

Another classic.

One of my favourite books of all time. Franny and Zooey is comprised of three conversations - Franny and her boyfriend, Zooey and his mother, then Franny and Zooey. That's it. It's testament to Salinger's unrivalled skills as a dramatist and sculptor of dialogue that the whole thing feels utterly riveting.
Anybody considering writing as a career needs to check out this book to see how Salinger's mundane observations (how a character holds a cigarette, the contents of the Glass family bathroom cabinet) build on one another to create an entire world. It's spellbinding, and not a little bit galling.