an excerpt of       

J. D. Salinger: A Life. By Kenneth Slawenski. New York: Random House, 2011. 450 pp. $27.00.

Reviewed by Myles Weber

Very early in his new biography of J. D. Salinger, Kenneth Slawenski makes an ominous inference—ominous, that is, if you value nuanced analysis in your biographical reading. “As Sonny would one day reflect,” writes the biographer, referring to the future novelist by his childhood name, “his ancestors had an amazing penchant ‘for diving from immense heights into small containers of water’—and hitting their mark every time.” Those familiar with Salinger’s fiction might recognize the line Slawenski quotes from “Seymour—An Introduction,” which in fact describes the survivalist feats not of Salinger’s ancestors but, rather, of the ancestors of the novella’s first-person narrator, Buddy Glass. Salinger made no secret of the fact that The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield was an autobiographical creation; moreover, throughout the Glass family stories collected in Salinger’s three other books, Buddy shares the occupation (author), purported hobby (spiritual inquiry), and personality (reclusive) of his creator. But we are not therefore free to assume that autobiographical utterances from Salinger’s narrators have in every case a direct, one-to-one correspondence to Salinger’s own experiences. A biographer must take great care to make only reasonable inferences from even the most nakedly confessional works of fiction.
Thankfully, Slawenski is more circumspect throughout the remainder of the book. For example, he accepts the author’s own assessment of the story “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” as being merely “a spiritually autobiographical piece,” not a factual account of a bus ride Salinger once took as a teenager. And though he suggests that in the story “Down at the Dinghy” the author “relied heavily upon memories of his own childhood,” presumably to deliver the tone and texture of the piece, he does not seek real-life sources for the key elements of the plot.
When Slawenski chronicles Salinger’s military experience—the centerpiece of the book—he considers the biographical implications of Salinger’s fictional works with similar care, as well he might since the book’s guiding thesis, Slawenski’s explanation for Salinger’s oddly truncated career, hinges on the wartime material. . . .