The well-known dedication of J. D. Salinger’s “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction” reads: “If there is an amateur reader still left in the world — or anybody who just reads and runs — I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.”
A Life
By Kenneth Slawenski
450 pages. Random House. $27.
The reclusive Salinger, who died a year ago at 91, seems to have found that ideal reader in his latest biographer, Kenneth Slawenski, founder of the fan site DeadCaulfields and now author of a new life of Salinger that is earnest, sympathetic and perceptive.
This volume, “J. D. Salinger: A Life,” which draws liberally from Salinger’s letters and a memoir by his daughter, Margaret, is flawed by a tendency to assume direct correspondences between the author’s life and work. And it retraces a lot of ground covered in earlier books by Ian Hamilton and Paul Alexander. Still, it does so without the sort of condescending and at times voyeuristic speculation that hobbled those earlier biographies, and it does an evocative job of tracing the evolution of Salinger’s work and thinking.
Read the full review at New York Times.
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