I appreciate all the difficulties inherent in writing a biography of J.D. Salinger: the reclusive nature of the man himself, the lack of interviews, the inability to recourse to correspondence, the very likely highly "slanted" memoirs regarding the man we have received. This isn't an easy subject, and I applaud the author for taking it on. Brave work, and far from an easy task.

However, what we have to work with is what we have to work with, and we don't really want to squeeze available materials until they give up "biographical data" that may not be there to begin with. The extensive literary critiques of Salinger's work (which I often found to be controversial interpretations and would caution the reader to make his or her own reading of the primary text rather than to wholeheartedly embrace the author's interpretation) that supposedly reveal details about the author's state of mind-- this is a controversial way of doing biography and is certainly highly susceptible to flaw.

The detailed analysis of WWII is fascinating-- but it is ultimately an analysis of WWII and not of Salinger's own experience in WWII, because we don't know much about his experience in WWII. I do think it's fair to say that the war had a great influence on Salinger's writing, but the author treads a fine line between generalizing the experience of all soldiers and making into Salinger's own personal experience and actually extracting the few pertinent details of Salinger's own war experience that we do know and explaining how they might be relevant to Salinger's biography. At times, I felt like I was reading a history textbook and not a biography. Well-researched, yes, but not exactly on-topic.

And, unfortunately, it must be said that the author is simply a poor writer. His style is lacking, and he does not possess the flair to make one editorial battle sound very different from the next. It makes certain sections of the book seem very repetitious.

The book's main problem is that the author tries to do too much with too little-- and again, that "too little" is not his fault. It results in dragging out some sections for entirely too long (sections of analysis about early struggles to get published are documented in excruciating detail) when compared to the paucity of information about the later years. A biography about Salinger is necessarily going to be uneven in its distribution of information, but this book carries that imbalance to an extreme, slogging through editorial dispute after editorial dispute while rushing through to the end (the unplesant memoir toward the end of Salinger's life, whatever the degree of truth-- and I couldn't begin to make a stab at its veracity-- should at least be addressed, should it not?).

Some heavy editing could have improved this biography tremendously. I would not rely on it as a book for literary criticism, but people interested in the early years of Salinger's publishing career will indeed find much information here. ( )

Salinger is a strange dude. That's all I have to say about that. ( )

http://home.comcast.net/~tonydal/wiseguy_reviews.htm ( )