The two youngest members of the Glass family are both actors. Franny is having a nervous breakdown and muttering a Catholic prayer like an earnest acolyte. Zooey, her big brother, is there to counsel her, but he isn’t helping. “We’re freaks, the two of us,” he tells her, “and both of those bastards are responsible.”
The “bastards” in question are Seymour and Buddy Glass, the family’s two oldest siblings, who filled Franny and Zooey’s heads with all manner of Hindu, Buddhist and Christian mysticism as soon as they were old enough to think. Add a B.A.’s worth of poetry and a dollop of ego-focused 1950s psychology and the result is a family of self-consciously intellectual New Yorkers who can’t blow their noses without trying to see God. If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that ultimate meaning is whatever your intermittently rational mind makes it out to be—so long as you can make it stick. That sounds underwhelming, but the journey toward this conclusion includes enough provocative and fascinating pit stops to make you sorry to have to leave these overly conscientious thinkers once the reading’s done. Reviewed on Feb. 17, 2022