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The Prayer. The new book concerns a religious-emotional crisis in the life of Franny Glass, youngest member of the clan, and tells how her brother Zooey argues, browbeats and jollies her out of it. Franny is first seen during a football weekend being met at the station by a young man named Lane Coutell. The train pulls in: "Like so many people who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person." This is the sort of bull's-eye at which Salinger is unmatched. It is felt by the flesh as much as by the mind; for an instant, the reader's cheeks sag as he remembers, with ridiculous guilt, the last time he met a train. During lunch (at a French restaurant, naturally; Lane is no steak man), the young man turns out to be insufferable. Salinger destroys him mercilessly as he shows Lane smugly explaining some choice portions of his latest A paper. Gradually it becomes clear what is troubling Franny; she suffers, like Holden Caulfield, from an intense weariness of all that is phony, from an oversensitivity to the world. She is sick of all the egos madly dancing around her—at school, in her summer theater, at the luncheon table at which Lane Coutell is dissecting Flaubert along with his frogs' legs. To escape, Franny has seized on a religious classic called The Way of a Pilgrim, in which an anonymous Russian peasant tells how he roamed the land first learning, and then teaching, the Jesus Prayer. " 'Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.' I mean that's what it is," Franny explains with careful casualness. "If you keep saying that prayer over and over again—you only have to do it with your lips at first—then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while. I don't know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person's heartbeats . . ."
Lane, bored, listens just closely enough to be able to dismiss the whole thing: "I mean I think all those religious experiences have a very obvious psychological background." He is supposedly talking as a realist, but he obviously knows nothing about reality. Franny, on the contrary—weak, overwrought, muttering mysticism —has about her the luminous common sense and the clear eye for life that mark all the memorable Salinger girls of whatever age, from Phoebe Caulfield on. Eventually Franny faints. When the story first appeared, coed readers, earthy creatures all, ignored Salinger's mysticism and decided that she was pregnant. (So did their mothers, who telephoned by the dozens to say not on any account to go to Dartmouth the next weekend.) But Franny is not pregnant. When she comes back to consciousness, she stares at the ceiling, then begins to move her lips soundlessly over and over again in the Jesus Prayer.