SOURCE: "Anxious Days for the Glass Family," in The New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1961, pp. 1, 52.

In the following negative review, Updike contends that Salinger's characterization of the Glass family is inconsistent and idealistic

Quite suddenly, as things go in the middle period of J. D. Salinger, his later, longer stories are descending from the clouds of old New Yorkers and assuming incarnations between hard covers. "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," became available last year in Stories from the New Yorker 1950-1960, and now "Franny" and "Zooey" have a book to themselves. These two stories—the first medium-short, the second novella-length—are contiguous in time, and have as their common subject Franny's spiritual crisis.

In the first story, she arrives by train from a Smith-like college to spend the week-end of the Yale game at what must be Princeton. She and her date, Lane Coutell, go to...