Franny & Zooey and The Employees

It’s easy to neglect that the New Yorker often publishes works that approach the size of an 80 page paperback in a single magazine issue: JD Salinger’s Franny & Zooey, John McPhee’s Oranges and Coming into the Country, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: All published in their entirety, sometimes serialized, before they were books.¹ While they’re less frequent and shorter, we’re lucky the New Yorker still has the audacity to do this knowing full well they’re sending you another issue in two weeks.

Franny and Zooey

I’d never read any Salinger before I picked up Franny and Zooey. Its curious title stared me down for years but it took an endorsement by Stephen Metcalf on Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast for me to finally pick it up.

In Franny, I wanted so desperately for her beau Lane to shut the hell up for just one fleeting moment and pay attention to her. She traveled by train to visit; she’s clearly in love with him, yet he treats her like an accessory. I vainly wanted so much for her to find a way to escape his insufferable self-importance without harm.

Then along comes Zachary “Zooey” Glass. Before we get to whether he might show his sister some humanity, we first have to suffer some interminable and cruel dialog with his mother, Bessie.

“Oh I’d like to put a diaper on that mouth of yours,” says Bessie Glass at one point. You and me both, Bess. After a battery of verbal assaults on his mother, he relents and talks to (at) his sister.

Maybe it’s how men like Zooey and Lane were in the 50s. I suspect it’s probably how their set still treat each other: Cruel, self-important, disinterested, and transactional in the extreme. Maybe with less smoking?

Even though I spent much of this book begging Zooey, and Lane before him, to cease and desist, I really liked Franny and Zooey. It reads almost like a play: Dialog punctuated around specific settings, observed keenly, and surrounded with subtext. There’s also a lot I see in myself, and others, from when I was 15 years younger.

Steve also recommended Janet Malcolm’s recent critical reëvaluation of Salinger in the New York Review of Books. She notes a parallel between Salinger’s Glass family and Kafka’s Metamorphosis that I hadn’t noticed while reading but now see quite clearly. Both stories are “fables of otherness:” individuals who see themselves outside of community. Franny and Zooey, unlike the poor bug, can in fact do something about it if only they had the will.

Franny, I think, does. She doesn’t buy Zooey’s hasty generalization that their older brothers made them this way and there’s nothing to be done. She is deeply depressed by her intellectual alienation and considers following Paul’s commandment to “pray without ceasing,” by reciting the Jesus Prayer that it might break loose something in her psyche blocking her ability to relate to others without judgement.

She sees right through him and wishes he would just shut up already and that her mother would stop trying to fix her. She might just find her way out if left to her own devices.

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The Employees, Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken)

A lot of people opine these days about the future of work. Most of what I see is looking a couple decades into the future at most. Olga Ravn’s The Employees looks further ahead to a world where humans upload their consciousness to remote “humanoids” to work aboard The Six Thousand Ship orbiting a far away planet.

What they’re doing, nobody is really sure, and they know they’ll have no memory of it after they’re decommissioned and re-uploaded elsewhere in the nameless corporate dystopia. In a Blade Runner-esque move, it’s unclear whether the Six Thousand Ship has both human and humanoid crew, or if it’s all humanoids, some of whom only believe themselves to be human.

That central tension emerges through a series of statements recorded from the crew members about the objects collected from the planet they orbit, and how they affect their work.

This book was profoundly strange, recalled Black Mirror’s Beyond The Sea and George Saunders’ short story Escape from Spiderhead from 10th of December.² And I basically loved it.

It’s not a beach read, but short chapters and compact profile made for the exact literary stimulus I needed. Go check it out.

1. Matthew Aldridge has a whole site showing many of these longer pieces if you want to explore them further. ↩︎
2. I drew a line from that story back to Kafka, too, so I guess that officially makes me a Kafka fan. Kafkaesque times call for Kafkaesque lit? ↩︎