Franny and Zooey

It's great to be here.

Louise, you're here to talk about your new novel, Stations, and the three works that influenced it, and you've picked a unique collaboration between a photographer and a writer that documents Irish migration, a searing memoir of homelessness in London, and the great J.D. Salinger's novella about two siblings' difficult transition to adulthood, Franny and Zooey.

But first, Louise, let's turn to your new novel, Stations.

It's a story of a bond forged between two teenagers, Roisin and Red, who are growing up in small-town Ireland in the 1980s, and it begins with Roisin acting as a messenger to pass Red a love letter sent from another girl, which, in today's world of texts and Snapchat, feels wonderfully archaic, doesn't it?

... of influences, Louise.

And this is a slim novella by a writer that I'm sure most people listening will have heard of, J.D. Salinger, author, of course, of his classic 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

You've not picked The Catcher in the Rye, but rather J.D. Salinger's second last book from 1961, Franny and Zooey, which is about two precocious siblings struggling with the transition into adulthood.

Mm.

And I think I'm flattered by these guesses, but neither are correct.

The correct answer is Zooey Glass from J.D. Salinger's books on the Glass family, and of course, primarily Franny and Zooey.

If you want to get to know me a little better, read that book.

And also, it's just a great book.

So you want a sense of inevitability, that this argument you're making explains all kinds of things that people have always noticed about that period.

In the same way that when I lectured on Franny and Zooey, I asked you what was obvious to you about the novel, and then my argument went around and spoke back to those things at different points.

So this general argument aims to speak to those obvious parts, but it speaks more strongly to those obvious perceptions.

And so, uh, I- I'm launching into a different kind of argument.

[coughs]

That's okay.

This is strangely minority, but I think in Franny and Zooey, they're a minority as intellectuals, and then, uh, Franny is-

is-Yeah.

It's a way of becoming not just, uh, close to the real, but also part of some mystical unity.

That thread of the mystical quality of language at its extreme of literary power is what I drew out of Franny and Zooey.

So Salinger, too, has the dream that the artifice of literature, of literary language, the performance of language i-

This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom.

So my first question to you is, what are some of your favorite first pages or beginning of novels that you've ever read?

So I chose, when I was thinking about this question, I chose, of course, a novel that I've referenced many times on this podcast, which is Franny and Zoe by J.D. Salinger.

And in the first scene, the first section is Franny.

So for those of you that don't know, Franny and Zoe is J.D. Salinger's novel, and it's about the Glass family.

And the Glass family has seven children, and the youngest two are Franny and Zoe.

So the first section of the book is Franny.

And the very first scene, it's in the 1950s and she's bundled up in her fabulous, I'm sure very chic coat.

And she's at college at Yale or Harvard, I can't remember which.