SOURCE: "Franny" and "Zooey," in The Fiction of J. D. Salinger, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958, pp. 46-52.

In the following excerpt, Gwynn and Blotner provide a mixed assessment of the stories "Franny" and "Zooey."

It is quite another story with "Franny," the best chapter in the Glass history largely because it is the shortest (10,000 words) and the most concentrated. Franny is a guest of Lane Coutell at an Ivy League football weekend in 1954, and preoccupied not with revelry but with religion. She tries to love Lane, but he is too concerned with himself, and she finds her own college teachers and friends and herself too self-centered to generate love. "I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego," she mourns. "My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It's disgusting—it is, it is."

Franny's only...