SOURCE: A review of Franny and Zooey, in The Minnesota Review, Vol. II, No. 4, Summer, 1962, pp. 553-57.

In the following excerpt, Daniels perceives Zooey as one of Salinger's most complex and complete characters.

Reading first a novel like Malamud's [A New Life], and turning then to Salinger's Franny and Zooey is almost bound to make a reader feel acute regrets at both sorts, I think. The writers of scope and breadth and open-end optimism (if that is what it's called) have left such gaps, such hollow centers; have contrived to emote about such public yet simultaneously nonobjective emotions; and have managed finally through their abuses to make of Compassion and Optimism stale jokes. So I think we feel (if stock characters and gestures in modern fiction have not too hopelessly dulled us) an enormous gratitude to Salinger for reminding us that characters in fiction can even now respond...