Franny and Zooey

Last night I finished re-reading J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey.  This book, like much of the other Salinger that I have recently read is pretty much what I remember it to be.  The characters are a little more grating to me than they were when I read this in college.  Having a little more distance, and reading more broadly since then, I think I have a better handle on what Salinger was doing.
In this novel and in much of his work there is a tension between maintaining a cool, ironic distance and sincerity.  In The Catcher in the Rye, and here, there is a lot of discussion of being a phony.  I think that there is a little better definition of what that means in this book, but it is still something ill-defined.  But this lack of definition seems more due to the struggle of sincerity itself.  If characters, or people want to be sincere, doesn't this undercut sincerity itself?  These works seem to ask the question whether one can try to be sincere.  This is a similar question that seems to plague Infinite Jest, but the irony is an even deeper one in that novel.
This book contains one short story titled "Franny" and a longer story, or novella Zooey, that are primarily about the two characters named in the titles.  In "Franny," the title character visits her boyfriend at his college and is disturbed by everything around her.  She tries to connect with the boy but finds his concerns juvenile.  She is irritable and distracted throughout their visit.  She collapses at the end of the story, presumably because she has not bee eating and due to the stress of her recent crisis of personality.  She is distanced from her studies and her own personal life.
This scene sets the stage for Zooey which falls into roughly three parts.  The first is a discussion between Zooey and his mother, Bessie Glass, while Zooey soaks in a bath.  In this section, Salinger does for Zooey much of what he does for Seymour in Seymour, an Introduction.  That is, he works to define his personality from Buddy Glass' perspective.  In the middle third of the piece, Zooey talks with Franny, who has returned to the family home to recover from her breakdown.  Zooey alternately comforts her and argues with her about her recitation of the "Jesus prayer."  The final third of the story is a continuation of Franny and Zooey's discussion, but over the phone with Zooey pretending to be their brother Buddy.  Franny realizes that it is actually Zooey and they are able to reach a sort of resolution to their disagreement.
The heart of this story lies in the Jesus prayer and Franny's search for meaning.  I won't go into detail here about the Jesus prayer.  I think there is something more interesting going on.  Zooey seems primarily worried that Franny is using the prayer for the wrong reasons.  The pair pretentiously judge others for wanting things for the wrong reasons, and for wanting things at all.  Franny dislikes professors who want to appear professorial, dislikes her peers for appearing to want to gain knowledge, and dislikes her boyfriend for being proud of an essay that he wrote.  Zooey warns her against this attitude, telling her that he had been guilty of the same judgements.
Zooey wants Franny to consider what her motivation is in using the Jesus prayer.  He wants her to have a knowledge of Jesus prior to using the prayer.  His concern over her intentions plays into the concept of phoniness that dogs so much of Salinger's work.  Zooey lumps a desire for knowledge into the same category as desire for prestige or desire for wealth.  These things are all superficial and those who desire them are phony.  This puts Zooey and Franny, and the other Glass children in a bind.  Franny is in crisis because she is having difficulty reconciling her desire for enlightenment and meaning against the charge of being phony.  She is blind to the true desires of those around her and is guilty of the same superficiality that she finds so off-putting.  Their discussion keeps circling these few points.
There is more to the story but I want to cap this off with a general observation.  This tension between sincerity and artifice will come to a boiling point in a lot of postmodern fiction.  The trouble with detached irony is that it has the ability to destabilize every utterance.  Franny can't tell when Zooey is being sincere and persistently begs him to just leave her alone.  Even when Zooey wants to help her, his own personality gets in the way.  Seymour is presented in Salinger's works as the paragon of sincerity.  He also kills himself.  Every other Glass child struggles with their own affectations and these discussions seem to keep recurring.  There does not seem to be a resolution.
Of course, the other possibility is that this is all just a reflection of Buddy's insecurity.  Buddy reveals himself to be the author of many of these pieces about the Glass family.  How much of this, one wonders, is just about Buddy himself?