Franny and Zooey are two stories titled as simply as the cover of the book. With Franny, Salinger introduces the first and who we'll later learn is the youngest of the Glass family itself. Here's the thing: he wrote of the family before Franny, including at least three shorts within the “Nine Stories” collection. Now I wish I had begun my journey there, but C'est La Vie, as it is said, and I do not own a copy of Nine Stories. I'll fix that before continuing on to the final Glass stories in “Raise High the Roof Beam, and Seymour”, which is also the final book Salinger agreed to publish.

The angst and depression I found with Holden in “Catcher in the Rye” is here with Franny, yet could hardly be described in the same manner. Franny is older and dare I say wiser without fully knowing her? I think so. Her short little story leaves you hanging with questions, and with the pondering of why the book she carries, “The Way of the Pilgrim” has deeply effected her. Don't worry because it continues in the wider, broader story of Zooey, who in name is her closest brother. These two stories were published in the New Yorker magazine some two years apart in the 50's, and so I wonder of the speculation readers experienced between them at the time, and whether even Salinger himself knew he'd write more on Franny.

What I described as depression is not even known until well into the second story, nor that Franny's character has found her way here. Both things were a bit of a surprise for me. Though Zooey, the story, is quite longer than Franny, the time-span is again no more than a few hours. There are certain words that Salinger gets hung up on, but that doesn't bother me. What I love is how much of the family is known without actually knowing. Zooey says a thousand words to Franny, all of it interesting to me, but it really comes down to only a closing few.

Caro Salinger, se solo sapessi quanto mi hai migliorato la giornata! Sono seduto accanto alla finestra e fuori è una splendida giornata primaverile con un sole accecante.
Chiudo gli occhi e immagino che questa sia la stessa luce che illuminava il salotto di casa Glass.

Insomma, oggi ho deciso di canalizzare solo energia positiva!

"Voglio dire, se riesci a farti venire un collasso con tutte le tue forze, perché non puoi usare quella stessa energia per star bene e darti da fare?"

I read this marvellous book in the winter of 1973-74 and it marked for me a moment at which my adult intelligence was crystallized. The product was a plodding, alienated way of thinking that marked me with a modern label: a keenly sensitive existentialist.

Oh, not so sensitive as I’ve become, many, many books of life stories later.

I was still a chrysalis that hadn’t yet broken open into the world’s stark terror. Like Franny. A child of Pax Americana. Alone and isolated and struggling to come to terms with the vast echoes of an uncaring world.

Echoes only - for I was at that early stage of a very conditioned adaptation to that world: the stage of the sudden irruption of a lately-teenaged self into organized lonely chaos. Ah, the days of youth. Days when I could still romanticize my struggle in Whitmanesque language!

At night, after work at my first fulltime job after uni, I sat before my little red plastic Sony B&W TV, and watched pseudo-existential mush like Kojak - or, in better taste - the stark early films of Ingmar Bergman on the weekends.

But here’s the thing. It took me a lifetime of anxiety before I would be finally able to turf the Ego-Ring of Self along with Frodo - at his last stop: Mount Doom.

The nightmare of Mount Doom had appeared irrevocably to Salinger’s Seymours and Zooeys, as it started to do to me at twenty, though in a dreaming state. Luckily, for I was never as bright as the Glass wiz-kids.

My cauchemars of Mount Doom would always be dispelled into the convenient mists provided by my mood stabilizers.

I wake to sleep,
And take my waking slow.

Is it any wonder Theodore Roethke was such a guiding light to me back then? But Roethke never turfed his Ring.

Through a lifetime of prayer and meditation, I was able, finally to say my good-byes to all its black magic.

As Eliot reminded me so often, “humility is endless.”

But Franny and her too-bright siblings are justifiably proud.

For the world’s taste, if not for God’s.

But what business does God have in a jarringly alienated Salinger Universe?

None whatever.

So they say.

Franny And Zooey

I had the opportunity to read "Franny and Zooey" for a book group following upon the death of J.D. Salinger (1919 -2010). I had read "Catcher in the Rye" and this book as well, as I remember, late in high school but had not revisited the author since then.

I was struck by the religious, spiritual themes of the book, especially its involvement with Eastern religion and with mysticism. My interest in Buddhism has increased in recent years as I have become older. Salinger's books, which appealed to young people many years ago, seem to have aged with the time.

The book includes two short interrelated stories written a few years apart, "Franny" (1955) and "Zooey" (1957), which were published in book form in 1961. The two are the youngest children of the Glass family that Salinger created. Franny is 20 and her brother Zooey 25. There were seven Glass children, all of whom were intellectual and child prodigies who appeared, over the course of nearly 20 years, on a radio quiz show called "Its a Wise Child." Their intellectual brilliance, among many other factors, left them confused about themselves. The oldest Glass child, Seymour, had committed suicide seven years before the events described in "Franny and Zooey". In these two stories, Franny and Zooey are shown with their difficulties and with their attempts to come to a sense of peace, understanding, and detachment in terms which are overtly spiritual.

The story "Franny" takes place over a college football weekend in 1955 where Franny comes to visit her boyfriend, Lane Coutrell. The story takes place over lunch between Franny and Lane and consists of their conversation. Franny is critical of her boyfriend and of his conventionality. She criticizes her professors and most of the people around her for what she sees as complacency, ignorance, and egoism. In seeming contrast to what she perceives, Franny carries with her a Russian religious book called "The Way of a Pilgrim" which discusses the need for continuous prayer as a well to self-illuminations. She discusses "The Way of a Pilgrim" and other forms of religious mantras found in Eastern religion with a skeptical and uninterested Lane during the course of their lunch. She collapses. (I was moved to read "The Way of a Pilgrim" after reading "Franny and Zooey".)

The longer story "Zooey" takes place a few days following Franny's weekend with Lane. It is set in the Glass family home in New York City. The first character we meet is Zooey who is rereading a long letter from his brother, Buddy, which recounts the Glass family story and urges Zooey to be active and to make something of his life. The remainder of the story consists of conversations between Zooey and his mother, Bessie, and between Zooey and Franny. Zooey struggles to overcome his feelings as a "freak" and as an outsider and to suppress his disdain for a culture devoted to television. Zooey is concerned for his sister and for her devotion to what he perceives as a religious cult which will separate her from the need to go forward and live. Franny and Zooey have two intense conversations, the first face-to-face, and the second over the telephone where Zooey initially disguises himself as the brother, Buddy. Both Franny and Zooey seem to find ways of moving forward following their conversations.

The book as a whole reminded me most of the Bhagavad gita in its theme of activity and doing what one needs to do more than of any Buddhist teaching. The book also reminded me of Kerouac who was active at about the same time as Salinger. Reading it as someone who is far from young, I had a sense of the quandries in which Franny and Zooey found themselves. I have struggled with some of the same religious texts and issues over the years. For all its success, this is a book that should be read quietly and in solitude.

Robin Friedman

’I used to believe we were just like those trees
We'd grow just as tall and as proud as we pleased
With our feet on the ground and our arms in the breeze
Under a sheltering sky’

‘Twirl me about, and twirl me around
Let me grow dizzy and fall to the ground
And when I look up at you looking down
Say it was only a dream’
-- Only a Dream -- Mary Chapin Carpenter

I’ve had this book on my to-read list for years, so long now that I can’t remember when I put it on there, only that my son recommended that I read it shortly after he did. I’d added it to my library list and I received a copy - finally - after waiting so long that I’d forgotten I’d requested it. I don’t remember reading any reviews for this, so I had no idea what the story was about, or I probably would have postponed reading it for another time.

Franny and Zooey are the youngest of the Glass family, both in their twenties. As children, along with their five siblings, they were cast on a radio show, a show which was popular enough for them to gain some degree of notoriety. Zooey, especially, seemed to stand out, with his ability to remember and recall virtually everything.

Of their siblings, one, Seymour, has committed suicide, and another - one of a pair of twins - died a tragic death. The living twin is now a priest, and one sibling is a teacher who seems to have isolated himself from what is left of his family.

Young and pretty Franny seems somewhat detached from her life, and from those she is surrounded by, in particular Lane, a young man who she is seeing. As though she thinks she ought to be charmed by his attention and behavior, but actually finds him to be a bit obnoxiously vain and self-centered. She struggles with her feelings that he seems to lack any real substance, weighing everything against the book she has been reading, ’The Way of the Pilgrim’, a story of a man who travels the globe repeating the Jesus Prayer. Through this she seems to connect to her brother, Seymour, on one level, but also seems to be pulling away from everything and everyone.

Zooey is concerned, and tries to reach out to her, while at the same time she seems to be drifting further and further away.

Zooey’s story, meanwhile, seems to largely take place while he is taking a bath, the curtain closed, with his mother sitting on the toilet trying to have this strange conversation with him, and smoking. His frustration mounting from having to repeatedly ask her to leave, his words seem to drift away from her, like the smoke from her cigarette. She is insistent that he must reach out to Franny, as she fears she is on the verge of an emotional collapse.

’There is a kind of accidental theme, though. The theme is connection. We are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.
When times are hard, we need a deep kind of comfort. Something elemental. A solid support. A rock to hold onto.

The kind we already have inside us. But which we sometimes need a bit of help to see.’


Many thanks to the Public Library system, and the many Librarians that manage, organize and keep it running, for the loan of this book!

I am the luckiest person in the world. The last few months have led me through an unbroken string of good books. I have had so much fun reading that I'm just in love with books right now.

And isn't that the way it should be?

In any case, Salinger's Franny and Zooey is the most recent in what I hope will be a continuing tradition of engaging, well-written stories. I have to admit I approached the work with some skepticism, having been wholly uninterested in Catcher in the Rye when it was forced upon me in high school (and now, I am looking forward to going back and reading Catcher).

It's really in the dialogue that Franny and Zooey shines. I found their discussions completely absorbing and their subject-matter intriguing. Even the correspondences represented in the work are fun and filled with the kind of silly banter that reminds me of my own letters to my wife before she was my wife.

As far as story goes, it really is pretty slight and primarily relies on four distinct conversations over the course of a few days in which Franny has a sort of spiritual nervous breakdown. I found the whole thing—the breakdown, the conversations, the conclusions—all to be uncomfortably believable in that I could easily imagine such a set of things occurring somewhere in real life.

To conclude, Franny and Zooey is a short book that can be swallowed at breakneck speeds. It would be worth seven times the amount of time I spent on it.

اولین بار که این کتاب را خواندم بیست ساله بودم. سر یکی از این کلاس های مربوط به مزخرفات مذهبی. از همان موقع ترجیح میدادم اگر قرار به هدر دادن وقت باشد, جور بهتری هدر برود. پس سراغ یک کتاب جو زده رفتم. و از آنجایی که من و همه دوستان و همکلاسی هایم جو زده بودیم خیلی هم خوشم آمد. حال و هوای آن روزهای من, حال و هوای فرانیِ بیست ساله بود. دلزده از آدمهای نامحترم و خودبین و بادکرده از ارزشهای بی ارزش. جو زدگی طبیعی بود.

مدتی پیش در راستای پاکسازی قفسه های کتابم, خودم را از شر ترجمه اش خلاص کردم. غافل از اینکه نسخه اصلی این کتاب یک جایی بین وسایلم جا خوش کرده. وقتی هفته پیش بین ریویوها چند خط اثرگذاری خواندم تصمیم به دوباره خوانی گرفتم.

فرانی بیست ساله این بار نه به من نزدیک بود و نه قابل درک. دخترکی بود بی تجربه و جو زده که فکر میکرد به جواب رسیده.
اینبار شخصیت زویی برایم قابل تحمل تر و قابل درک تر بود. کسی که تجربه چیزها را از سر گذرانده و بیهودگی شان را دیده و رهایشان کرده.
هرچند پختگی لازم را نداشت.
امروز بادی را بیشتر میفهمم و خودم را به سیمور نزدیکتر حس میکنم.

در مورد کلیت کتاب اما نظرم نسبت به ده سال قبل افت کرده.
به جز چند جمله قشنگ, چیز جدید و جذاب دیگری برای من نداشت و خیلی جاها تکنیک تندخوانی و اسکن و اسکیم را رویش تمرین کردم هاهاها.
تنها چیزی که در این ده سال در نظرم تغییر نکرده همان تک جمله طلایی فرانی است; جمله ای که جدید نیست و شاهکار سلینجر هم نیست. جمله ای که من و شما هم ته فکرمان و ته دلمان ممکن است هر روز بهش بربخوریم اما روی کاغذ نیاوریم و تبدیل به کتاب نکنیم.

این کتاب خوب نوشته شده اما شاهکار نیست. برای من قابلیت مزه مزه کردن ندارد. نفسم را بند نمی آورد. دوره دارد. یا داشت. حداقل برای من. همان بیست سالگی بهترین زمان بود. اگر بلد بودم بیشتر از همدلی و تایید فرانی, روی تجربه های بقیه شخصیت ها تمرکز کنم. که خب بلد نبودم. هیچکداممان بلد نبودیم.
اما یک چیز را همان موقع هم خوب بلد بودم. همان تک جمله. اینکه خوب بودن کافی نیست. دوست داشتنی بودن کافی نیست. اینکه بین این همه دوست داشتن ها یک چیزی شدیدا لنگ میزند. اینکه حالم از این همه دوست داشتن و روابط و آدمهای خوب و دوست داشتنی بهم میخورد اگر نتوانم ذره ای و حتا ذره ای بهشان احترام بگذارم (یا به من احترام بگذارند). ده سال است که آدمها همه دوست داشتنی اند اما در پایان یا از یک جایی به بعد, ناامید کننده و غیر قابل احترام. نبودِ احترام هم دایره ایست که به غیردوست داشتی بودن میرسد.
ده سال است که دلزده ام از هرکه و هرچه که حس احترام در من به وجود نمیاورد.
ده سال است که تکه ای از وجودم فرانی و تکه ای دیگر زویی است و با هم میجنگند. تکه ای دیگر, بادی است و به تکه ی زوییِ وجودم هشدار میدهد. و تکه ای دیگر در من مصرانه میل به سیمور شدن دارد

آقای سلینجر,
مرور دوباره ی همه اینها, باعث شد با اینکه دوستتان ندارم اما به خاطر همدلی شدید به خاطر چیزهایی که لابد از سر گذراندید تا به آن جمله ها برسید, به شما احترام بگذارم.
شاید حرکت روی این دایره احترام, روزی منجر به دوست داشتن تان و خواندن باقی آثارتان شود.

Здесь два рассказа – со стороны Фрэнни и со стороны Зуи. Повесть о Фрэнни начинается со встречи с ее молодым человеком, с которым она во время свидания ведет интеллектуальные разговоры, в частности о поэзии и кого моно считать настоящим поэтом. Фрэнни считает, что «Если ты поэт, ты создаешь красоту. Понимаешь, поэт должен оставить в ас что-то прекрасное, какой-то след на странице.» Лейн – безусловный пижон, ему важен внешний лоск, даже в интеллектуальных беседах. Он сначала был доволен, что обедает в подобающем заведении с подобающей девушкой… (Боже, кто устанавливает все эти стандарты и понятия?) Потом, как Фрэнни не согласилась с его восхищением поэтами Мэнлиусом и Эспозито, все его довольство и важность сдулись. Фрэнни находится в духовном кризисе, она чувствует себя самодовольной, противной самой себе. Ей кажется дурным вкусом играть на сцене, она считает это эгоцентризмом. В своих духовных поисках она натыкается на книжку, написанную православным старцем «Пусть странника», в которой описывается, как нужно молиться Иисусовой молитвой, непрестанно повторяя одну и ту же молитву. Она вдохновлена идеей, что молитва, слова молитвы попадают в такт сердцу, и это как то мистически влияет на мысли, мировоззрение, и человек совершенно по-новому воспринимает и понимает все на свете. В книге написано, что в самом начале даже необязательно верить, а все дело в количестве повторений. И само по себе слова молитвы начинают действовать. Лейн, поглощая своих улиток и деликатесы, внимательно слушает, впрочем, он ничего не понимает из сказанного. Фрэнни продолжает развивать свое понимание идеи, отсылая к буддийской практике многократного повторении «Наму Амда Бутсу», что означает «Хвала Будде Амитабхе», важно многократное повторение имени Бога, или как в Индии слова «Ом». Она считает, что это не просто совпадение. Далее идут размышления Зуи, предваряемые предисловием автора. Он в отличие от Гэтсби, считал своей первородной добродетелью способность отличить мистический сюжет от любовного, и его рассказ – это сложный, многоплановый рассказ о любви, почти полностью состоящий из письма Бадди Гласа. Благодаря восемнадцатилетней разнице в возрасте, все семеро детей Глассов поочередно были звездами радиопередачи «Умный ребенок» в течение 16 лет. Бадди в своем письме провозглашает идеи любви и уговаривает Зуи получить докторскую степень, прежде чем окунаться в актерскую профессию. Он сетует, что если бы в раннем детстве Симор и Бадди не подсунули Зуи в список обязательного чтения Упанишады, Алмазную Сутру, Экхарта, Зуи было бы легче достигать актерского мастерства. Актер должен путешествовать налегке. Бадди и Симор, как старшие братья, вкладывали все свои усилия для воспитания младших, Френни и Зуи, и они исходили из понимания, что «образование будет сладко, а может еще сладостнее, если его начинать не с погони за знаниями, а с погони, как сказал бы последователь Дзен-буддизма, за незнанием». Разговаривая с матерью в ванной, Зуи выражает свое мнение, что то, что творится с Фрэнни не связано с религией и критикует психоаналитиков. Он считает, что психоаналитик «должен верить, что только милостью Божией ему дарован природный ум, чтобы хоть как-то помогать своим пациентам». Если она наткнется на жуткого фрейдиста, эклектика или просто жуткого зануду, то после анализа ей станет еще хуже, чем Симору. И он вынужден сам провести психоанализ и помочь найти ту спасительную мысль, которая выведет ее из тупика. Он говорит много чего умного, но доходит до Фрэнни только идея Симора о Толстой Тете, ради которой стоит постараться. Зуи только подтолкнул ее к пониманию, что Толстая Тетя – это абсолютно любой человек, все зрители, в том числе и Таппер, которого она яро невзлюбила. Далее мысль развивается в духе Дзен-буддизма, что на свете нет ни одного человека, кто бы ни был Толстой Тетей. И Толстая Тетя, и зрители, и Таппер – это все Иисус Христос, то есть все люди – воплощение Бога. Кризис был преодолен, мир наступил в душе у Фрэнни.

Dünyada hoş şeyler de var -hakkaten hoş şeyler yani. Hepsini​ birden ıskalayacak kadar da salağız biz. Olup biten her şeyi hemen o sefil küçük egolarımıza gönderiyoruz mütemadiyen."

I think I am about to put both brother and sister Glass on my top 5 list of alltime great characters, it’s very hard not to love these two very smart smartasses, who never seem to loose a grip on themselves, (even with all their passion), or on the fact that all that they know and are, may very well be worth nothing.

There have been so many theories on why it is that Mr. Salinger stopped publishing, and reading this book, (I may as well throw my own, since everyone seems to have one) I wonder: Maybe he decided that writing with the idea of publishing was making him give some things up for others, that is, giving up writing the best possible book in order to be liked, or respected, or whatever it is that people think when they read something by an already well known author. Being percieved by others maybe makes you, sometimes, percieve yourself, which is probably the worst thing when you are in the middle of a creative process. Who cares really? But if you have already published, and are respected, does that make some annoying noise in your head as you write a next possible great or not so great, or not understood something or other?

Both Franny and Zooey talk about the importance of art for art itself, for the perfection of it, and for the search of doing something good. And how to avoid being complacent if you know that whatever it is that you are doing, that is, writing, or acting, or doing anything creative at all, becomes something for people to like you, and not the best possible thing that can come from you.

Now there is a hard line to see, and how do you know when you have crossed it? It seems a question that is all over the book, and a question that is not really answered. You can do things and not respect the people who are going to see them, but you must do what you do anyhow. If you find that whatever it is in particular is your calling. And how do you know that? You just do.

I.love.this.book.

Edited to include visual: "Disaffected Young Adult," which is a picture of MFSO, used with his permission, with the following explanation (in his words): "I refer to it [the picture:] as 'Too Much Fun' and that it's from the end of my first year in college in the summer of 2004 while in the midst of three days with no sleep or food and a lot of chemicals."

* * *

As a former Salinger aficionado, I wanted to look back and consider how I felt about Salinger now.

In Salinger’s two-part novel, Franny and Zooey, Zooey, Franny’s older brother and in some ways her mentor, tells Franny that the problem with her rejection of the world…

is the way you [Franny:] talk about all those people. I mean you don’t just despise what they represent—you despise them. It’s too damn personal.”

Zooey’s critique is one that could also be leveled at a great deal of Salinger’s work; there is a lot of time spent in these novels and short stories on categorizing people and their actions in ways that are often more petty than profound.

Franny, in the first section of the novel, emerges as a character clearly critical of the world around her. She keeps herself at a distance—a spectator categorizing and dismissing life rather than a participator. When telling her boyfriend, Lane Cotrell, about her trip on the train, Franny reduces the other female students on board to types, “Everybody else on the train…looked very Smith, except for two absolutely Vassar types and one absolutely Bennington or Sarah Lawrence type.” When Lane goes on at great length about his paper on Flaubert, Franny accuses him of being a “section man,” a term she’d coined for little men “usually a graduate student or something” who go “running around ruining things for people, and they’re all so brilliant they can hardly open their mouths.” Accentuating her distance, Franny’s actions are similarly out of sync: at the train station when Lane is constrained, Franny is exuberant; when Lane sits at the restaurant contemplating his feeling of well-being, Franny becomes paler, less well; and when Lane eats with gusto, Franny abstains—nauseous and ill.

Franny’s need to categorize and label the world around her helps to preserve her distance. On a literal level, Franny already removed herself from the theatre department, dismissing actors as a bunch of…

egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm. Kissing everybody and wearing their makeup all over the place, and then trying to be horribly natural and friendly when your friends come backstage to see you…

Similarly, Franny thinks of getting out of the English department because she is “just so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers.”

In some ways, Franny’s distance from the world was imposed. Her eldest brothers, Seymour and Buddy, introduced Franny and Zooey to the readings of “the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas—who knew something or everything about this state of being,” so that, as Buddy explains in a letter to Zooey (years later), they would understand what the great prophets had to say about the world before they learned about “Homer or Shakespeare, or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence.” The problem is, as Franny bitterly explains to her mother, their early indoctrination makes both Franny and her brother “freaks.”

Franny’s distance was also exacerbated by her childhood appearance on a radio show entitled “It’s a Wise Child.” Franny, as well as her other sister and five older brothers appeared on the show over spaced intervals for a period of 16 years. The show served as a showcase for the children’s precocious ability to answer “a prodigious number of alternately deadly-bookish and deadly-cute questions…with a freshness, an aplomb, that was considered unique in commercial radio.”

To get away from the phonies and to effect a spiritual rebirth, Franny holes herself up on the family couch and repeats over and over again the words of the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” According to the book, The Way of a Pilgrim Seymour introduced to Franny when she was a child, the prayer, once started and repeated incessantly, eventually becomes “self-active” or automatic and provides, as Franny puts it, a “really tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook.”

Zooey again intervenes. The problem with Franny using the Jesus prayer is that she does not understand who Jesus is and instead prays to a figure who is “Jesus and St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi’s grandfather all in one.” Zooey goes on to explain that saying the Jesus prayer without understanding who Jesus is, is futile since the purpose of the prayer is to “endow the person who says it with Christ-consciousness.”

However misguided Franny’s actions might be, she, like all the mostly adolescent or young adult characters that populate this fiction, remains appealing, and particularly so for the adolescent audience much of Salinger’s fiction attracts. In my teens, I devoured Salinger’s work, and it helped provide the corroboration I needed to sneer at the world, and consider adults as one fairly stupid homogenous group—people who were older, but certainly not wiser.

It would be interesting to know, if in any of the 15 novels now reputedly finished and locked in a safe, whether Salinger ever chose to view the world less cynically and from a vantage of characters somewhat more mature.

It’s not hard to understand, though, why Salinger has achieved his cult-like status.

وقتی این کتاب رو میخوندم یاد شخصیت هاری هالر افتادم در گرگ بیابان اثر هرمان هسه که مثل زویی تاب تحمل زندگی با اطرافیانش رو به خاطر بی هدفی و کم مایگی در افکار و عقایدشون، نداره....
سالینجر ، داستان زندگی خانواد گلس و ۵ فرزند نخبه و باهوش این خانواده را روایت میکند. داستان ابتدا به شخصیت فرانی می پردازد و در فصل دوم به شخصیت زویی پرداخته می شود که برادرِ فرانی هست. فرانی و زویی آخرین فرزندان خانواده گلس هستند که تحت تعلیمات عرفانی و آموزه های دینیِ شرقی برادر بزرگتر (سیمور) بودند که ده سال پیش از روایت داستان، خودکشی کرده.‌‌‌‌... برادر دوم یعنی بادی الان جای سیمور را گرفته و جدای از خانواده زندگی میکنه و تقریبا عزلت نشین هست.
فرانی تحمل زندگی سطحی اطرافیانش و دوست پسرش رو نداره و به جای سازگاری با جامعه ای که در آن زندگی میکنه اقدام به مبارزه با آن جامعه میکنه و به خاطر اینکه آرامش روانی پیدا کنه به عرفان پناه میاره.‌‌فرانی هدف زندگی اطرافیانش رو خیلی سخیف و سطحی عنوان میکنه و از اینکه افراد جامعه اش صرفا با دنبال کسب ثروت یا موقعیت مطلوب اجتماعی اند زندگی و هم زیستی با اونها رو غیر قابل تحمل میدونه.. در جایی فرانی به زویی که برادرش هست میگه که دانشجوها حتی نمیدونن برای چی به دنبال کسب علم هستند ، هیچ کس برای کسب خرد به دنبال علم نیست. صرفا دنبال علم میروند تا موقعیت اجتماعی یا ثروت یا چیزهای دیگری رو کسب کنند‌... از این رو گرایش به عرفان پیدا میکنه تا قدری تالم خاطر پیدا بکنه .ولی طی یه مکالمه طولانی با برادرش به این نتیجه میرسد که زمانی می توانی زیبایی های مسیح رو درک بکنی که از زیبایی های جزیی در زندگیت غافل نشی .... در جایی زویی به فرانی میگه که : چطور ی می خواهی یه مردِ مقدس واقعی رو وقتی میبینی اش، بشناسی وقتی نتونی حتی یه فنجون آب مرغ مقدس( مادر فرانی برای بهبود سلامت دخترش که دچار زکام شده چند سری آب مرغ به دخترش میده که فرانی هر سری اونو پس میزنه) رو که زیر دماغته رو بشناسی. از نظر زویی همه چیز دنیا زیباست حتی سوپی که مادرش درست میکند تا به خواهرش بدهد یا بازی دختر بچه با سگش که از پنجره اونو تماشا می کرد.... در جای دیگری می گوید می توانی از الان تا روز قیامت دعای عیسی رو تکرار کنی ، ولی اگه نفهمی تنها چیزی که توی زندگیِ دینی به حساب میاد وارستگیه ، نمیدونم چه طوری می خواهی یه اینچ از جایی که هستی جلو بری . وارستگی رفیق، فقط وارستگی و بی آرزویی.
زویی به فرانی میگه اگه این دنیا اذیتت میکنه، اگه آدم هایی که توی این جامعه دارن زندگی میکنن ، افکار و عقایدشون تو رو آزار میده. به اون توجه نکن ( برگرفته از آموزه های فلسفه رواقی و خصوصا مارکوس اورلیوس) خوشبختی از درون ذهن انسان تبلور پیدا میکنه نه از امورات خارجی.... فقط بدون که یه جایی تو این دنیا یه نفر هست که دوسش داری و به خاطر اون کفشاتو برق میندازی این شخص میتونه تمام اون آدمایی باشن که یه زمانی حالت ازشون بهم میخورد...همه اینها بستگی داره به اینکه نگاهت رو به آدمایی که باهاشون همزیستی داری تغییر بدی تا بتونی با آرامش زندگی بکنی