Franny (Frances - age 20) experiences the beginning of an existential nervous breakdown in her story. She's with her boyfriend at a restaurant and starts to tear down everything he says. She basically tells him that he's an idiot and all the people in her world are idiots as well. She's chain-smoking while doing this and refusing to eat her food. Then she passes out while walking to the bathroom. When she comes too, her boyfriend says he'll get a cab for her. Presumably, he gets her back to her NYC family home because then Zooey's story begins shortly after this fainting incident.
Zooey (Zachary - age 25) is in the bathroom taking a bath and reading an old letter from one of his brothers who encourages him to follow his dream of acting regardless of what their mother thinks he should do. He finishes reading the letter and proceeds to start looking at a script for a project. Then his portion of the story really takes off. The mom comes into the bathroom and has this long, drawn-out conversation with Zooey. The conversation is borderline abusive with Zooey calling his mother stupid and fat and things like that. The mom just chain-smokes and berates Zooey too, telling him to go talk to Franny, who we learn is malingering on the couch in the living room chanting The Jesus Prayer to herself. Zooey says he has a million things to do that day and can't be bothered since he talked to her the previous night.
To make a long story short, Zooey does go and talk to Franny in the living room (another long conversation) and eventually walks out of the room because he's driven her to tears. Then he calls her later from a phone line within the same apartment to speak more kindly to her and she fares much better with the kinder conversation. She seems to have an epiphany or a moment of enlightenment at the end of the nicer conversation, and so the story ends.
I know I usually don't type so much detail about a plot. Even with this one, I've left out a great deal about the oldest children in the family and their role in the current situation. Since they were originally two stories, though, I wanted to give each story a little description. The book has a lot of religious references and meditations. It actually reads more like a play than a book. The dialogue is so dense that it's hard to remember you're reading two interconnected stories. If you are interested in religion or spirituality, it could be an interesting read for you. If not, I'm afraid you may be unable to finish it. The characters do come off as pompous, entitled brats at times, especially in the way they speak to one another. However, by the end you get the sense that they do care about each other in some odd, abstract, philosophical, academic way. Even with characters like that, I enjoyed this one much more than The Catcher in the Rye because it was more thought provoking for me and also more memorable.
