the fat lady is jesus.

this little bit is an email i wrote to meg, my floridian friend & co-student, who mentioned franny & zooey briefly. i have a very hard time being brief in this regard.

franny & zooey is a strange little book, there's almost no plot, and less action; you can stop reading now if you want 'cos i'm incapable of talking about this book in passing terms; franny has her "little green book" that she carries around with her throughout; for several years, this was my version of that; i called it my hip-pocket book. one of the tensest scenes happens w/zooey in the tub and his mother on the other side of the curtain. you get to see them try and have a conversation, each in turn trying to connect just as the other retreats, over this whole mountain of historical prejudice and mother-son expectation and learned roles. (it is perhaps my most-loved scrap of dialogue.) the whole book is centered on franny's college-aged crisis, her professors and favorites all seeming phony. she has this crisis and flees home. ultimately the story is zooey's as much as hers, 'cos it's him trying to help her, to talk to her in a way that is generous and not self-centered, and he's not good at it, in many respects, so he's figuring stuff out too. ...sorry, miss meg, i'm not at all meaning to go into a synopsis-style defense of it, here. all of that is context for the larger point, which is that you're right, zooey does come out with a christian thing near the end, recalling how seymour used to make him shine his shoes for the radio show they were on as kids, which didn't make any sense, and then they talk about the hypothetical fat lady who is christ (in a as-to-the-least-of-these-you-do-unto-me kind of way). and sure, we can all chalk up seymour as a tremendous christ figure, and blah, blah blah that's exactly what my 11th-grade lit teacher taught us to look for. yay for us, we see that seymour is a christ figure, only he killed himself instead of being killed, how ironical. (i actually do love that christ-figure element, but it's more robustly centered in other glass family stories; i especially like raise high the roofbeam, carpenters.) here, seymour's burden is only superficially the point---it's pointing to the point. the point is franny's little green book, the pilgrim's way, which is about a nameless, lame, 14th-century russian wanderer who is trying to do as st. paul instructs (in ephesians or somewhere), and learn to pray without ceasing. franny is so taken with this idea; she wants to do this. she's...christ, she's halfway through college: she's bright and beautiful, has just dumped her boyfriend, and is positively doubtful of her ability to love, to honestly care for anyone, about anything. she wants to sacrifice herself to this noble abstract: pray without ceasing. franny's at a point that i experienced at exactly that time in life, in college but with graduation in sight. the sum effect is to be absolutely insecure about herself and absolutely cynical of the skills and ideas of others. she's lost and skeptical of all the intellects and influences she so recently trusted, and so she has the book with her in the very first scene when she gets off the train; and also in that beautiful scene where she has lunch with her hatefully conceited college boyfriend, where she takes it with her into the bathroom stall, sets it on her lap, and has a panic attack severe enough that she passes out. and later, as she recuperates at home, where zooey sees it, and he speaks of it knowingly but somewhat caustically--enough that she's quietly very affronted. zooey, at least with his sister and mother, is sophisticated without being tactful. but that's when the book begins to come down off the pedestal for franny, and it's the set-up for the fat lady/christ thing. i too remember being disjointed by the ending, the first time through it, and even still a little bit the 2nd. but the entire story serves to make it's last point; or, no, rather, as i've come to perceive it, the ending serves to point my eyes backwards over the story i've just read: love is all that's left. without love, the ability to pray without ceasing has little point, and none that christ cares about; without love, seymour's suicide remains too selfish to see how lonely he was, too selfish to be forgiven; without love, the idiosyncratic neediness of your family is enough to suffocate you. ...that's my franny & zooey ramble, part I. you don't have to like it, i promise. after i recommended it for the reading list last year, my professor trashed it to me---without demonstrating that he'd ascertained anything, or even that he'd finished it---and i had to work a bit to retain my opinion of him. but i did, and now i'm fine.