In Search of JD Salinger: A Biography

Ian Hamilton sets himself a tough challenge by attempting a biography of a writer best known for his hermitic nature and for not having published anything in the last 30 years. Hamilton romps briskly through Salinger’s life employing an annoying device throughout by which he records the debates between himself and his “biographer alter ego”. This half- hearted attempt to problematise the nature of biography is, seemingly, to excuse the gaps in the text. It does not work well. At the end of In Search of JD Salinger we learn more about the lawsuit provoked by Hamilton’s first attempt at this book. This, the edited version, is not the book nor, in a sense, the life that Hamilton wanted to produce. It is a poor substitute for what might have been. A life of Salinger has its interest, of course, but when that life has deliberately eschewed publicity in the interest of the art that such asceticism may create should we not focus on the work created? The literary criticism, when it comes, is clumsy and does not make up for either the paucity of facts or the lack of insight or real investigation into Salinger’s silence. Hamilton’s first book was to be entitled J D A Writing Life — he should have focused on that writing a little more closely. — Mark Thwaite