SOURCE: "Finally (Fashionably) Spurious," in National Review: A Journal of Fact and Opinion, Vol. XI, No. 20, November 18, 1961, pp. 341-42.

In the following negative review of Franny and Zooey, Didion discusses the didactic quality of Salinger's prose.

When I first came to New York during the fall of 1956, I went to a party on Bank Street which I remember with particular clarity for a number of reasons, not the least of them my surprise that no one present wished William Knowland were running for President. (I had only been in New York a few days, and the notion that Democrats might be people one met at parties had not yet violated what must have been, in retrospect, my almost impenetrable western innocence.) There were a couple of girls who "did something interesting" for Mademoiselle and there were several rather tweedy graduate students from Princeton, one of whom intimated that...