Sergeant Salinger

A notoriously camera-shy figure in his later years, Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger developed something of a hermit-like reputation in his final years and could occasionally be glimpsed glaring angrily at photographers as an old man. This enjoyable novel takes us back to the great American author's early years as a rising literary star in the 1940s, in particular, his traumatic experiences during some of American soldiers' bitterest fighting during the Second World War.

A compelling and often
poignant fictional portrait
of a young Salinger and
the psychological impact
of his war experience on
his life upon his return to
civilian life. A masterful
and very often quite emotional "portrait of a young man as a war veteran" as we follow his struggles to overcome the horrors he witnessed in Europe at the end of the war & as he painstakingly
tries to get his daily life
back on tracks and move
on. The engrossing portrait
of one of America's most beloved authors offered to
us by one of America's greatest wordsmiths at work today. A marvellous and unforgettable fictional journey to be enjoyed without any moderation👍

Many thanks to Netgalley and Oldcastle for this terrific ARC

When I first read The Catcher in the Rye at the age of 17, I wanted to marry Holden Caulfield, not knowing yet that Holden had been to war liberating my country, and that his creator did in fact at some point marry a German woman. But my fascination with J.D. Salinger started right there. I learned a great deal about what actually went down between D-Day and the May 8th 1945 from the big Salinger biography by Shields and Salerno, so I knew what to expect in Sergeant Salinger in terms of his war experience - but the way Jerome Charyn retells the biographical events in this remarkable unputdownable novel hit you on a different level. The scope is smaller, more personal, and that is what makes it so blatantly clear that no one person could ever contain the magnitude of the horror the soldiers back then went through. As a German, I’m deeply grateful to the allied forces for liberating our country from our self-inflicted regime. I am glad that this novel contributes to their memory. The way Charyn describes Salinger’s war trauma bleeding into his attempts at civilian life are a perfect depiction of the way a traumatized mind can work. The hints at his post war writings are clever and woven into the plot with beautiful sensitivity. And meeting his sister Doris was a particular pleasure - she rocks! Sergeant Salinger is a must-read. Phenomenal.

The Catcher is the Rye has always been one of my favourite novels – definitely one of the books that hooked me to literature in my teens. For this reason I was overjoyed to see a novel on J.D. Salinger’s younger years, an account of his WWII experience and the aftermath. We meet Sonny and his Jewish family: he is a “lanky boy with big ears… and olive skin” (someone teases him as Dumbo). He has published a few short stories in the New Yorker, lives on Park Avenue and accompanies his sweetheart Oona, Eugene O’Neill’s daughter to fashionable venues such as the exclusive Stork Club, where we also meet Hemingway.

But in the streets Posters of Uncle Sam keep calling him, and soon life takes him to war, protagonist of important (and horrible) events such as D-Day landing on Utah beach, which resulted in mayhem, and the liberation of concentration camps. Charyn’s fresh, immediate style does not spare details of the atrocities and brutality young Salinger witnesses, his nervous breakdown, his difficult experience as a Nazi hunter and interrogator, and the relationship with the German doctor met in a hospital and later in an interrogation room who became his wife, something I found quite weird.

The novel, which takes biographical facts as a starting point, paints a haunting picture of a wounded man, a hellish picture of war and Salinger’s tasks as a painful business, and thus posits that his pessimistic world view has been shaped by what he witnessed and PTSD. This is a very interesting interpretation that Charyn espouses and that no doubt can help readers contextualise and better appreciate Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye, a novel gestated in this period. As well as understand where we come from. Sergeant Salinger is no Catch-22 but the theme resonates and it is more immediate and approachable. Well done, engaging and thought-provoking.

My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest revie.w.

I enjoyed this book and found it gave a view of the Counter Intelligence Corps activities during WWII. Reading this book I discovered how little I understood about the way that PTSD and mental health affected servicemen's lives and their families. I would recommend this book to you and I think you will find it thought provoking yet at the same time giving you a thoroughly good read.