SOURCE: "J. D. Salinger's Closed Circuit," in Harper's Magazine, Vol. 225, No. 1349, October, 1962, pp. 46-8.

In the following essay, McCarthy examines the phony and artificial nature of the characters of Franny and Zooey.

Who is to inherit the mantle of Papa Hemingway? Who if not J. D. Salinger? Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye has a brother in Hollywood who thinks A Farewell to Arms is terrific. Holden does not see how his brother, who is his favorite writer, can like a phony book like that. But the very image of the hero as pitiless phony-detector comes from Hemingway. In Across the River and Into the Trees, the colonel gets a message on his private radar that a pock-marked writer he darkly spies across the room at Harry's Bar in Venice has "outlived his talents"—apparently some sort of crime. "I think he has the same pits...