Sergeant Salinger

Starred review from September 7, 2020
In this literary tour de force, Charyn (The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King) recreates J.D. Salinger’s experiences during WWII. The book begins with a bravura set-piece in which Sonny Salinger goes on a date with teen debutante Oona O’Neill to the Stork Club, where he rubs shoulders with columnist Walter Winchell, gangster Frank Costello, and his idol, Ernest Hemingway, before returning home to receive his draft notification. Assigned to the Army’s much-feared Counter Intelligence Corps, Sonny storms Utah Beach on D-Day, helps to liberate Paris, survives the Battle of the Bulge, and frees the inmates of a concentration camp, all the while carrying with him the work-in-progress that will one day become his masterpiece. One year after the end of the war and a nervous breakdown, Sonny returns home to his family in New York, accompanied by a German war bride and suffering from writer’s block. Charyn makes a persuasive case for how America’s most famous reclusive author endured the horrors of war and carried these memories into his postwar writing career. With standout scenes—Sonny’s disastrous bar mitzvah, a confrontation with Hemingway at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, a breakthrough in Bloomingdale’s bargain basement—Charyn vividly portrays Sonny’s journey from slick short story writer to suffering artist. The winning result humanizes a legend.

October 15, 2020
As the author of The Catcher in the Rye and therefore assured of a place in the literary canon at a young age, the enigmatic Jerome David Salinger holds a sure place in our collective imagination. His later hermetic life and misanthropic reputation would only further cement the Salinger myth. In his latest biographical novel, Charyn (Cesare, 2020) offers a fresh perspective by focusing largely on Salinger's time in the Counterintelligence Corps in Europe during WWII. This proves to be a nuanced and acutely perceptive approach as Charyn artfully renders the many battles (Utah Beach, the Battle of the Bulge) and atrocities (Dachau) Salinger witnesses, resulting in a postwar stay at a psychiatric clinic. All this follows an opening set piece in which the young writer woos the teenager Oona, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill. Darling of the New York debutante scene and frequent guest of Walter Winchell at his table at the legendray Stork Club, Oona broke J. D.'s heart when she married the much older Charlie Chaplin. Charyn offers an astute psychological portrait of an elusive yet vastly compelling subject.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2021

From treatises on ping-pong to biographies of Joe DiMaggio and Ernest Hemingway, Charyn (Once upon a Droshky; Bronx Boy: A Memoir) boasts a voluminous bibliography spanning genres. Here, Charyn pens a biographical novel about a reclusive author with a small but influential body of work: J.D. Salinger. The narrative unfolds across five years, from 1942 to 1947, following a young Sonny Salinger as he is drafted into World War II and witnesses unspeakable atrocities. From the sands of Utah Beach to the Battle of the Bulge, Sonny experiences the carnage of war while sketching the outlines of what would become his most famous novel. Returning home from war with a wife and compromised mental health, Sonny sees his life slowly unravel while his field notes and writings come together in the form of a novel and several short stories. Charyn deftly leaves the reader wondering whether Holden Caulfield's teenage angst was really Salinger's personification of post-traumatic stress disorder. VERDICT An engrossing but dark work of historical fiction about the last private person in America.--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2021
Charyn's latest foray into historical fiction is a richly imagined account of J.D. Salinger's years as a combatant and counterintelligence officer in Europe during World War II. The book opens in April 1942 at the Stork Club, where the rising short story writer has memorable encounters with the imperious Walter Winchell and the dashing but down-sliding Ernest "Hemmy" Hemingway. Sonny, as Salinger is called, is the guest of Oona O'Neill, the 16-year-old debutante with whom he is infatuated. The relationship ends when he is drafted and his "timid tigress" heads to California, where she will marry Charles Chaplin. (The war dashed Salinger's own dreams of acting in Hollywood.) In France, Salinger proves himself in battle and in negotiations with the enemy, working when he can on his "Holden Caulfield novel." He has punishing sex with Sylvia Welter, a German ophthalmologist doubling as a spy. To his Jewish family's chagrin, he brings her back to the U.S. as his wife along with their "Nazi dog." Increasingly, Salinger finds himself caught between reality and grim fantasy, haunted by traumatic war memories--a soldier with missing eye sockets whose "blackened teeth revealed a jarring smile, like an angel soaring into the unknown"; the harsh whistle of "Screaming Meemies," which "bit into your bones." With a nod to Catch-22, Charyn captures to darkly comedic effect the inhumanity of war and the altered state his hero lives in. Known to readers for his prickly nature, Salinger emerges as a likable eccentric with deep reserves of empathy, especially for young people. Building on the established facts of Salinger's life, this supremely engaging novel leaves us with a new, sometimes heart-rending understanding of the author and the times in which he came of age. A smoothly told, unexpectedly affecting foray into a lesser-known chapter of the literary giant's life.

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