J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist (Icons)
*Starred Review* Beller offers a uniquely literary inquiry into the combatively reclusive and epically blocked author of The Catcher in the Rye and beloved short story collections. Acutely attuned to the “aura of trespass” surrounding Salinger, Beller makes pilgrimages to Salinger’s boyhood home (Beller grew up nearby) and summer camp, and considers Salinger’s preoccupation with authenticity in light of the big family lie revealed after his bar mitzvah, that his mother wasn’t actually Jewish. Beller reports on young Salinger’s humorous writings for school newspapers and his love for his sister, who became fashion director for Bloomingdale’s, a career linked to Beller’s inquiry into the key roles clothing plays in Salinger’s fiction. Then there’s Salinger’s strange, doomed marriage to a “low-level” Nazi after serving as a counterintelligence officer in WWII and being among the first Americans to enter the concentration camps. Amid exciting close readings of Salinger’s distinctly affecting prose, Beller pays tribute to the overlooked New Yorker editor he believes helped Salinger excel, Gustave Lobrano. In all, a fine and stirring portrait of a haunted literary artist who rejected 17 “different shades of white” for the cover of Franny and Zooey, stopped talking to his daughter when she wrote her memoir, and barricaded himself in solitude, a “poet of longing,” elisions, and absence. --Donna Seaman