J.D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski

(Random House, 450 pages, $27)

How do you write a biography about a man who wished to remain unknowable? asked Matthew Price in Newsday. Author J.D. Salinger spent most of his life practicing a kind of “virtual extinction.” For more than half a century, he lived in self-imposed exile in Cornish, N.H., trying to escape the fame that came to him after the 1951 publication of The Catcher in the Rye. Yet that work and the few collections of short fiction that Salinger published continue to resonate with readers. One year after the author’s death, at 91, Kenneth Slawenski has managed to publish a sympathetic biography that, though not definitive, represents a noble attempt to “get behind the Salinger myth and find the man.”

Slawenski is particularly good on the details of Salinger’s first 40 or so years, said Charles Cross in The Seattle Times. The creator of a website that collects Salinger trivia, he has packed this book with enough minutiae “to satisfy even the most fanatical reader.” Some of the broad strokes we already know. Born in New York City and raised in privilege on the Upper East Side, Salinger was a fitful student who began writing seriously after taking an evening fiction class at Columbia. Drafted into the army in 1942, he landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, saw combat at Hürtgen Forest, and took part in the liberation of Dachau. Slawenski’s account might be strongest when exploring that period, and he makes a case that Salinger’s war experiences profoundly influenced his fiction.

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Still, Slawenski is not a very adept critic, said William Pritchard in The Boston Globe. He wastes too many pages on “banal rehearsals” of story plots, and his insights can be flatter still, as when he characterizes Salinger’s “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” as “a humorous story containing deep meaning.” Slawenski’s portrait surely will be outdone, said Richard Lacayo in Time. Too much a fan to probe deeply into those late-life recluse years, Slawenski simply “doesn’t solve the puzzle that was Salinger.” At most, he has located “some important pieces.”