SOURCE: A review of Franny and Zooey, in The Canadian Forum, Vol. XLI, No. 490, November, 1961, pp. 189-90.

In the following essay, Kirkwood offers a laudatory review of Franny and Zooey.

In common with the rest of the literate world one finds oneself in considerable awe of J. D. Salinger's power to transmit so eloquently the mood of the modern intellectual dilemma and to transmute it into such intensely moving stories as Franny and Zooey.

The artfully deliberate accumulation of detail, the cinematic selection of props in the scene, the apparently endless tangents of talk diverging in all directions are drawn together so tautly that in the end we begin to feel that we too shall choke, along with his characters, on the very stench of too much self-consciousness.

The two stories in this book have already appeared in the New Yorker and are part of the Glass family...