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?

Re-reading books, Pt. 2

The word on the virtual street has it that J.D. Salinger's family will be releasing the author's previously unpublished works in the near future.  Actually, I can pinpoint my precise level of insufferability even more exactly.  I was riding with my friend and his son to get dinner when I heard the piece come on NPR.  I shushed everyone in the car so that I could turn up the radio and listen to the news about the most English-majory of 20th century American authors.  Every good English major already knew that Salinger had kept writing after he had withdrawn from the public and many of us thought about the treasure trove of material he must have been accumulating.
After hearing the news, I decided to dig up a couple of my old Salinger books to prepare.  Just last night I finished reading Seymour an Introduction.  
About the best and the worst thing that I can say about it is that it is pretty much what I remembered it to be.  I guess the problem is more with me, the reader, returning to an author who had meant so much to me at a point when I was rather impressionable.  This reader found some solace in Salinger's paradoxical blend of sincerity and irony that would prefigure such authors as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, and other of the so-called post-postmodern.  It was new to me when I read it in college but now the irony seems worn and more cynical than I remember.  The sincerity is also a bit thinner and edges into bathos.  This is most likely a reflection of my own attitudes at different times in my life.  The tropes have lost their shine, as it were.
I will read the new books when they come out.  I am even planning on reading Franny and Zooey in the near future.  There is a part of me, though, that hopes that Salinger will have aged a bit more in his writing away from the public.