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Family Guru. In Zooey (which appeared two years later, and is as long and discursive as Franny is tightly and conventionally constructed), Franny has come back from the weekend and has taken to the couch in the Glass living room, clutching The Way of a Pilgrim, and petting her cat, Bloomberg. About her hover her actor brother Zooey (Zachary on the TV credits) and her mother Bessie. Zooey is a brilliant, funny and frighteningly eloquent "verbal stunt pilot" who, in the words of another member of the family, looks like "the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo." Bessie, vainly offering restorative cups of chicken soup to her daughter, is a fading Irish rose, looking touchingly marsupial in her blue kimono equipped with huge auxiliary pockets, whose contents Salinger, a master list maker, thoughtfully assays.
Zooey begins as she invades the bathroom occupied by her son to start a 71-page dialogue that leaves broad hints, for those who care to take them, that Salinger has set himself to writing an American Remembrance of Things Past. From this scene of high family comedy—Zooey in the tub with the shower curtain drawn for decency, affectionately insolent and fighting for a little privacy, Bessie philosophical and unbudgeable on the toilet seat, brooding over her family's fate—the reader learns that these two are not the only characters surrounding Franny in her crisis.
One of the others, the central but still shadowy character of the whole Glass legend, is Seymour, both family ghost and family guru, of whom little is said in the present book beyond the fact that he killed himself almost seven years before, that he was (at least in the eyes of his family) both a genius and a near saint, and that he relentlessly haunts all the surviving Glasses. It was Seymour who forced the other, younger Glass children to swallow an indigestible mass of Eastern mysticism and Western philosophy so that now they somehow give the impression of having collected quotations from Epictetus rather than baseball cards, of having played catch with some West Side reincarnation of Buddha. It is Salinger's special triumph that the wondrous and weird, the trivial and homey, coexist with complete naturalness—and humor—in the Glass world.*
It is in this atmosphere that Zooey attempts to bring Franny out of her obsession with the Jesus Prayer, mostly by seeking to show her that in her withdrawal from the people around her, by her spurning "cups of consecrated chicken soup'' ("which is the only kind anybody offers around this madhouse"), she is being egotistical. He fails, but much later, at the climax of the story, Zooey enters an unused bedroom in the huge apartment. It once belonged to Seymour, and it still contains a private phone listed in Seymour's name. Zooey sits for nearly an hour in a near trance, a pocket handkerchief on his head—this is the sort of touch that hooks itself permanently in the minds of Salinger readers—and then picks up the phone. A role is played, an identity shuffled (why and how involves complications that defy summary but seem perfectly plausible in the Salinger vaudeville), and finally Zooey talks Franny around by invoking, of course, the dead brother.