Christy's pick for May

"A Month in the Country," by J.L. Carr, was nominated for a Booker Prize in 1980. Looks dreamy and springlike to me.

Was there ever a chance?

When you finished the end of "A Chance for Mr. Lever," were you satisfied with the overall direction and resolution? Was this really a chance for Mr. Lever? Why or why not?

Narration

What did you think of the narration? "Franny" appears to be told by a straightforward third-person narrator who's not personally involved in the action. "Zooey," we learn at the beginning, is narrated by Buddy. Thoughts?

Next read

Has anyone read Graham Greene's "A Chance for Mr. Lever"? It's usually in collections of his short stories (one edition is featured on the left). If no one objects, it can be our next book read ...

Fatty

What did you think of Bessie?!

My eyes lit up every time she walked into the room.

I love how she's described as a "refreshing eyesore" among Manhattan matrons, who are always dressing up to go shopping at Saks. Bessie, by contrast, looks as if she never leaves the building at all. She putters around in her ancient kimono with the added-on pockets, containing "two or three packs of cigarettes, several match folders, a screwdriver, a claw-end hammer. a Boy Scout knife that had once belonged to one of her sons, and an enamel faucet handle or two, plus an assortment of screws, nails, hinges, and ball-bearing casters — all of which tended to make Mrs. Glass chink faintly as she moved about in her large apartment." Isn't that spectacular?

Did you even wonder why they were having the apartment repainted to begin with? Can you imagine Bessie, that old Vaudevillian, ever getting dressed and entertaining company? Did anyone ever visit? Still, there's something endearing about the way she pads from room to room all day trying to keep things going, battling clutter, worrying about the bath mat, trying to fix things, from the enamel on Zooey's teeth to Franny's mental state (as if there's not really much difference between the two chores).

One of my favorite moments in the book is when she tells Zooey, "Oh, I'd like to put a diaper on that mouth of yours!"

What do you think she added to the book? What was her role?

Franny's state of mind

This is kind of a crazy observation. But I happened on Kurt Cobain's suicide note. There was a link to it in a story I was reading online. And some of the wording — the stuff about empathy and pity and sadness — reminded me so much of some of the stuff going on in "Franny and Zooey," especially the stuff about being too sensitive. I guess the received wisdom was that Cobain was just terribly depressed.

Is Franny just terribly depressed?

The letters

Near the beginning of each story there's a letter that a character is seen re-reading. In "Franny," it's the letter from Franny to Lane, which he takes out of his pocket and reads again while he's waiting for her train. In "Zooey," Zooey is in the bathtub re-reading (for the umpteenth time) the letter from Buddy. What do you make of this parallel structure?