I’m sure you have heard of “The Catcher in the Rye,” and maybe you have heard of “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Now here’s what you may not know: J.D. Salinger, who wrote “The Catcher in the Rye,” wrote only three more books, and all of them featured the Glass family, who inspired Wes Anderson’s Tenenbaums. Now, you’re missing out if you haven’t heard of the Glass family, because the three books about them are some of my favorite ever. The family is similar to Holden Caulfield. They’re all disaffected East Coast young people who are out of step with society. This out-of-step-ness is as appealing to me as it is annoying to other people. Anecdotally, “The Catcher in the Rye” was a controversial pick in my high school. Some people, like me, loved it, but the majority found Holden Caulfield too whiny and just could not sympathize with or even stand him at all. If you were one of those people, you might as well stop reading now because the Glass family won’t be any less whiny to you. The one caveat to tack on, though, is that they are very, very intelligent, far smarter than Holden Caulfield.

To me, the appeal of Holden Caulfield is his relatability—the fact that I was Holden Caulfield at fifteen. But I don’t want to be Holden Caulfield, as his actions and thoughts are more embarrassing than anything else. The Glass children are different. We don’t meet all seven of them, but the five we do meet are smart and interesting, and even if they don’t have personal success in their lives, they are truly living a scholarly life of growing curiosity and intelligence. Since there are many Glass siblings to discuss, I want to just focus on the one who makes her thoughts the clearest.

Franny Glass clearly gives her opinions, and they never change throughout the course of J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” which is composed of two very long short stories, “Franny” and “Zooey.” The book follows Franny’s enlightenment, but the enlightenment comes only from her discovering the true nature of her already-held beliefs. Unlike many other stories of change, where the main character will disown their former self entirely (think Linguini in “Ratatouille”) and turn into a better person, Franny’s beliefs stay the same; she only knows that she is very lost in life, and thus she needs to figure out what to do with these beliefs. She is a 20-year-old college student during the events of the story who leaves her college to return home and have a mental breakdown. In “Franny,” she has an argument with her boyfriend, and then in “Zooey,” she is back home arguing with Zooey and going in circles. 

The first part of Franny’s argument is that everyone in college is so obsessed with knowledge for knowledge’s sake. She then notes that you barely hear the word wisdom used on college campuses and that knowledge should lead to wisdom. If it doesn’t, it is a waste of time. Most of what she complains about in relation to college is people trying to sound very smart or learning to seem smarter and not learning to be wise. Being wise, according to Franny, is actually leading a good life where one understands that nobody is better than them. Franny also notes early on that many of the people in her English department are simply interested in tearing down texts and that they do everything intellectually rather than with feeling. 

“If you’re a poet…you’re supposed to leave something beautiful,” Franny says, referencing the poets in her school’s English department. “The ones you’re talking about don’t leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but…it may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings.”

This is the next advantage of wisdom in her eyes: Wisdom means leaving behind something beautiful. You aren’t trying to seem knowledgeable. You are just trying to give back. 

Franny then complains to her boyfriend about how someone they both know seems like everyone else.

“It’s everybody, I mean,” Franny says.“Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.”

This is the next and final part of her argument: Everyone is like everyone else. They do it without thinking about it and see no problems with it. Yet it contradicts a bit with her other desire to not be seen as better than everyone else. She has outlined herself a hard place in the world: She shouldn’t be egotistical and see herself as better, like the poets who think they can write good poetry but can’t leave anything beautiful, and yet she also shouldn’t just follow along with everyone else. Her enlightenment comes when Zooey tells her to act because he can tell that she has a real talent for it, for bringing lots of emotions to her roles and for making the characters better than they are. That way, she can leave something beautiful behind.

However, how would this enlightenment look today? Would Franny not have her problems, or would she have them, but far worse? I think that the latter is true. First of all, the rise of the internet has massively increased the problems she has complained about. We have all of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and that has become a lot more interesting than wisdom. In fact, knowledge killed it with articles and articles of “information.” (I use quotation marks because who even knows much of the information is real.) Of course, wisdom is all very subjective. I can’t pull up a poll showing that Americans have become less wise over time or at least less interested in wisdom. It certainly feels that way though, when I hear the way that people from the 1950s talk in the media (Alfred Hitchcock movies, “The Twilight Zone,” “The Bell Jar”). They definitely sound wiser (to emphasize, not smarter, wiser. People in the 1950s were certainly ignorant about many issues). 

Similarly, the conformism Franny is criticizing is much more apparent today. The pressure on students to secure an internship is growing, and the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce said that the first thing parents ask at any college now is “How are the internships?” Suddenly we all aren’t even bicycling through Wales or working in New York City. We are just working in New York City. We now even have social media specifically dedicated to constantly updating our resume. I don’t think that what we are doing is more sadness-inducing than what we did then, but I do think that there are fewer people doing activities that aren’t sadness-inducing, thanks to the intense pressure we put on everyone to engage in internships and focus solely on their future career prospects. 

For Franny’s final point and her solution, I think that all of the arts today have been failing to leave something beautiful compared to the 1950s. The academization of absolutely everything has not been working. I have seen many arguments talking about the use of fairy tale imagery in “Midsommar” (2019) and its simultaneous critique of toxic masculinity and American imperialism, and yet nobody pointed out how boring it was to sit through. In fact, the recent gold standard seems to be to tackle as many themes as possible and if anything beautiful is left afterwards, it is only an aesthetic illusion (e.g. the lighting in “Euphoria” (2019)) and certainly has nothing to do with the actual content of the piece of media. However, rather than continue to try to completely tackle all art forms at once, I want to focus on how Franny Glass would have left her beautiful mark on the world: acting. 

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, I think acting was more of an art form. Actors were simply more iconic; think Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Marilyn Monroe. In fact, don’t even think that big. Instead, think Shelley Duvall, Robert Ryan, Anthony Perkins, and Barbra Streisand. These actors acted with their whole body. Every piece of them was on-screen. Actors now are simply smaller. Our most successful actors now seem to just act like how you think they should. There is not as much art to it, only logic. The actors don’t seem to improve the written material, they mainly just live up to it. (There are a few exceptions, but I think these exceptions are simply that: exceptions.)

I have thought about it for a while, and I don’t know where Franny would be if she was 20 today. But I think she was lucky to live in an age where she could, at least, act. Obviously, there are many upsides to living today, but everything that sent her towards a mental breakdown in “Franny and Zooey” still exists. 

Here is the final upside of it all: Zooey disagrees with her.

“I agree with you about ninety-eight per cent on the issue,” he says. “But the other two per cent scares me half to death. I had one professor when I was in college—just one, I’ll grant you, but he was a big, big one who just doesn’t fit with anything you’ve been talking about…. And what’s more, I don’t think I ever heard him say anything, either in or out of the classroom, that didn’t seem to me to have a little bit of real wisdom in it—and sometimes a lot of it.”

No matter how bad it gets, there will always be someone or something for Franny Glass—and all of us.

Henry Kaplan is a member of the class of 2028 and can be reached at hrkaplan@wesleyan.edu.