I didn't have the heart to give it one star; but had I the gumption, I would have. For a moment, I'll set aside the irony that a Salingerphile who goes to great lengths to assert the author's privacy-obsession wrote a biography about him, and focus on why Random House gave a book deal to a guy who simply operates a website about Salinger. Perhaps they are finally operating under the concept of their namesake: random.

Not that I think all scholars and biographers need to be professors or writers themselves, but seriously, Slawenski operates a corny looking fansite called DeadCaulfields (of all things) and doesn't have any other noteworthy criteria met to suggest he is the authority on the subject.

The writing makes me feel like I am in a History class with an octogenarian professor lecturing through cotton balls. It's dry and painfully tedious. I did learn a bit about Salinger, who is certainly one of my favorite authors. What I garnered most from this book was Salinger's publication history and the plot summaries (analyses, blah) of unpublished works.

What bothers me are the long winded presumptuous passages; for instance, we don't have a lot of information that describes Salinger's role in WWII, so Slawenski goes into a hefty diatribe with evidence from neighboring sources that "may" have been close to Salinger in battles to suggest what the writer himself was going through. Slawenski takes so many liberties with describing Salinger's place in the war that I forgot I was reading a bio of an author rather than a war account.

Aside from that, while Slawenski does provide some insights into analyzing Salinger's literature, I can't align myself with a lot of what Slawenski suggests. There are some points of his analyses where I thought he was so off, that I stopped reading to complain about it to random local coffeeshop denizens who had the misfortune of sitting near me.

Poor J.D., even one of his most obsessive fans can't respect his anonymity. But Hell, what am I saying? Bring on the posthumous collections!