Warning: This review contains spoilers
This book is special because it contrasts Zen teachings with 1950s consumer America.
We meet Franny Glass, a young woman who belongs to a family of gifted intellectuals. She feels overwhelmed by life’s superficiality and seeks answers in spirituality. The story is divided into two parts showing important moments in the lives of Franny and her brother Zooey.
A note about the author: Salinger was transformed by his experience in World War II, where he participated in D-Day and witnessed the horrors of concentration camps. Seeking inner peace, he moved to quiet New Hampshire, where he became deeply interested in Eastern philosophies and meditation practices.
Franny’s Zen journey
The book’s structure follows the Zen path.
Franny begins trapped in a personal crisis that functions as a Koan (公案), a riddle without solution through logical thinking. Tired of the falseness of the academic world, she seeks answers in a small book about the “Jesus Prayer,” repeating this prayer over and over like a mantra.
In her learning, her mother Bessie plays a fundamental role. She represents the perfect contrast: a practical, down-to-earth woman, concerned with everyday things like giving chicken soup to her sick daughter. Bessie, with her blue kimono full of tools in the pockets, embodies the ordinary world that Franny wants to escape, but which paradoxically contains the answer she seeks. Her maternal love, expressed through simple gestures, is a form of Mu (無), the dissolution of categories that Franny needs to understand.
Zooey, after a tense conversation with his mother in the bathroom, helps his sister in his own way. He is not kind but provocative, teaching her that her spiritual search is contaminated by her ego. It is precisely through the seemingly mundane figure of Bessie that Zooey shows Franny the wisdom hidden in everyday life.
In the end, Franny discovers that she had been looking for answers outside when they were really in knowing how to see the ordinary. The final scene suggests that she manages to reach a state of No-mind (無心, Mushin), where she stops striving and simply lives in peace with her reality.
*We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?
--A ZEN KOAN Epigraph from *Nine Stories* (1953) quoting the famous koan by Rinzai master 白隠慧鶴 Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769)