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“... J.D. Salinger, who is now in his early eighties, has spent the greater part of his life hiding out from the world on a hilltop in New Hampshire. Over the last half century, he has continued to write steadily, it seems, but to protect his reclusion he has refused to publish any of his work since 1968. Then – at the last minute, as it were – a former girlfriend, Joyce Maynard, a woman with whom Salinger had a nine-month relationship twenty-five years ago, decided to write a memoir of their affair – a memoir in which she details, among other things, his domestic, sexual and dietary quirks ...”

“... When​ I think of J.D. Salinger now – not the books but the man – the thing I find hardest to understand is the moment when, in his early thirties, he began to hide his face. In 1952 he hired the photographer Antony Di Gesu to take a series of portraits. With his prominent nose, jaw and cheekbones he looks as ruggedly confident as a prizefighter – in early life he was a handsome man ...”

“... the recent loss of his father, has had one in the zipped pocket of his suitcase for a while. Margaret Kearns, who is 36 and recently separated, suggests he fetch it and check the date on the foil (the packaging reads 07/25. They’re safe). The long-undisturbed contraceptive is a sign that neither of them has been expecting their mutual ...”

“... separation or restraint – he turned down those ideas, and instead wrote his book on Salinger. There, ironically, as it seems to me, with a man he didn’t know and would never meet, he proposed that ‘the biographer would be a character in his own book.’ Then came the book on writers in Hollywood – I realise that Hamilton is fascinated by ...”

“... novelist. But now he is on the verge of becoming a failed Jewish novelist, having declined into Salinger-like ‘meaningful silence’. The stories gathered here form a narrative sequence around the vacancies and small adventures of his career. Bech marries an Episcopalian, proud of her Scottish antecedents (‘Macbech’ deals maliciously with that). The ...”

“... name into magazine pieces about one-book authors, a cautionary roster of the silent that included Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison. Heller’s history reflected theirs – the dreams of youth and years of literary apprenticeship, a period of obsessed scribbling, enthusiasm from a publisher, a ...”

“... is elegantly crafted, subtly plotted, and its first-party voice is a lively, charming offspring of Salinger and Kelman and young Paddy Clarke. And yet, the book still reads more like a superior piece of lifestyle journalism than like a work of art. It reports on real things, and on real things never before seen within the covers of a hardback novel, like ...”

“... was considered one of the most resonant in modern American literature. Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger were his only competition. When Call It Sleep (1934), Roth’s first novel, became a bestseller, thirty years after it first appeared, reporters found him scraping a living in Maine, gloomily slaughtering ducks and geese with equipment he’d made out of ...”

“... into 2021: in a Pierre Cardin obituary; in a Gerry Marsden obituary; in a documentary about J.D. Salinger; in one of Netflix’s numberless true crime productions (viz, a reconstructed FBI interview with Charles Manson, peddling his ‘blame it on the Beatles’ spiel); a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles-at-home photo from 1963; a ‘previously ...”