I bought this about the time it came out, back in 2013, and even as I carried it to to the checkout counter at Barnes and Noble I was wondering why I was buying it. There was the David Shields factor--I had read and enjoyed three of his books--and I liked the jacket design, too, an evocation of the cover of the paperback Catcher cover that had been ubiquitous in my salad days.
But I wouldn't have thought I would be curious enough about Salinger's life to pick up a hefty (just under 700 pages, all told) oral biography of him. I had read his books, thought well of them, but he was never, for me, a particular favorite. I was reasonably certain I was never going to teach any off this books. Yet there I was, leaving the store with it, duly paid for.
So, I have been reading it desultorily over the last six years, I guess, and just finished. As oral biographies go, it's no Edie, but not bad. What have we learned?
I did not how horrible his WW II experience was--"For Esmé" should have been clue enough, but Shields & Salerno make the case for PTSD as the core of the oeuvre, and they have a point.
They have a long appendix describing the work Salinger completed (maybe) before this death, with the statement, "These works will be published in irregular installments between 2015 and 2020." Hmm, maybe not. I wonder what the hangup is. I would certainly be among the few hundred million curious to see what he was up to during the lengthy no-publications period.
My big takeaway, though, is that striking a massive chord with the youth of America is a mixed blessing...maybe not even that, maybe more of a very peculiar damnation. I'm thinking not only of Salinger, but of Harper Lee, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain. Does any American writer ever get off scot-free after re-wiring a generation's circuits? Dylan, maybe. Motorcycle accident and re-invention as escape hatch.
Still, having not only bought this brick of a book but also read it, I have to ask...why? Why am I curious about the life of J. D. Salinger?
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