franny glass is at college. she's brilliant. everyone around her is performing brilliance instead of having it.
she can see the difference. it's making her sick.

she's carrying a small green book — The Way of a Pilgrim. a russian spiritual text about saying the Jesus Prayer continuously until it beats with your heartbeat.
her boyfriend lane is talking about his paper on flaubert.
lane doesn't notice she's disappearing.

she faints in the restaurant. that's the story.
but it's really about: what do you do when you can see the phoniness everywhere and you can't unsee it?

zooey glass. franny's older brother. actor. reads in the bathtub for hours.
he is also brilliant. also sees the phoniness. but he functions.

the whole second story is zooey trying to reach franny — first through their mother bessie (one of the great comic characters in american fiction), then through a phone call pretending to be their dead brother seymour.

and then the ending.

zooey tells franny about seymour telling him — as a child — to shine his shoes for the Fat Lady. do the work for the person in the audience you can't see. the woman sitting at home with cancer, listening to the radio, with the flies buzzing around.

"don't you know who the Fat Lady is, buddy? it's Christ himself."

that's the whole book. every performance, every prayer, every act of craft — it's for the Fat Lady. it's for Christ. same thing.

the glass family is salinger's universe. seven children. former vaudeville performers for parents.
all of them on a radio quiz show called "It's a Wise Child" as children. all of them brilliant. all of them damaged by it.

seymour — the oldest, the most gifted — shot himself in a hotel room in Florida.
buddy — the writer. the one most like salinger.
zooey — the actor. the most functional. the one who can translate seymour's wisdom back into something liveable.
franny — the youngest. the one whose crisis gives the book its engine.

salinger spent his career circling this family. franny and zooey is the center of gravity.