This book joins two linked pieces about the Glass family of New York. In the first, Franny, a bright college student, visits her boyfriend for a weekend but finds herself disgusted by ego and pretension, and she begins to unravel. In the second, her older brother Zooey, a television actor, tries to help her at the family apartment, while their mother Bessie worries nearby. The pieces are mostly conversation, full of wit and family affection. They explore spiritual hunger, art and sincerity, and they deepened Salinger's picture of the gifted, troubled Glass siblings.
Quotes
Lane was speaking now as someone does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good quarter of an hour or so and who believes he has just hit a stride where his voice can do absolutely no wrong.
I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want — some bastard with wavy hair?
The facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do.
Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.