J.D. Salinger: A Life Raised High by Kenneth Slawenski

 

When J.D. Salinger died earlier this year, a glut of rushed, cash-in biographies could have been expected. However, A Life Raised High is much better than could have been expected. It’s written by Kenneth Slawenski, a long-time admirer of Salinger who maintains a fan website called Dead Caulfields, and he admits that he’d been working on this biography for a long time before Salinger’s death. His research seems well spent, because this book provides a good summary of all known information on the author of Catcher in the Rye. Nonetheless, he remains an odd subject, with a career that effectively ended when he turned 32 and little concrete information to build many chapters around afterwards. In some sense, this book is like a sports biography, with its subject accomplishing so much at a young age, and then apparently retiring suddenly. However, the difference is that nobody ever accused Joe DiMaggio of hitting home runs in secret. Salinger’s creative energies are widely supposed to have kept flowing after his withdrawal from the world, part of the continuing fascination with him. But Slawenski wisely sticks to the facts, which leads to a curiously weighted but responsible biography that does the man justice. [Keir Hind]