Publishers Weekly
★ 09/07/2020
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. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Sergeant Salinger
“Intense and absorbing.” —The Reporter
“Wonderfully recreates the war years of J. D. Salinger. . . . If you are looking for a more nuanced war novel, a story of World War II and what it did to the young men forced to fight it, this is the book for you.” —Michigan Daily
“Two intriguing suggestions are buried deeply in the story that Charyn tells so compellingly in Sergeant Salinger. One is that Salinger could have but chose not to write one of the great war novels of the twentieth century. (In a real sense, Charyn has done it for him.) The other is that Salinger’s experience of war drove him to explore only the inner lives of the characters he invented and to hide his own inner life from the generations of readers who revere him.” —Jewish Journal
“Charyn wisely avoids the biographical novel’s penchant for the blow-by-blow, scene-by-scene recounting of all the important moments in the subject’s life. Instead we are immersed in the immediacy of war as Salinger . . . has to psyche out the phonies and somehow remain true to himself.” —UniversityBookman
“[A] literary tour de force. . . . Charyn vividly portrays [J.D. Salinger’s] journey from slick short story writer to suffering artist. The winning result humanizes a legend.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This supremely engaging novel leaves us with a new, sometimes heart-rending understanding of [J.D. Salinger] and the times in which he came of age.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Charyn deftly leaves the reader wondering whether Holden Caulfield’s teenage angst was really Salinger’s personification of post-traumatic stress disorder. . . . Engrossing.” —Library Journal
“Nuanced and acutely perceptive. . . . Charyn offers an astute psychological portrait of an elusive yet vastly compelling subject.” —Booklist
“Charyn peers into the traumas that formed the lifelong recluse and his enigmatic stories. . . . The whole story makes for an engaging and informative rendering of an important American author.” —Historical Novels Review
“An in depth look at one of our most celebrated of writers. . . . Charyn answers the question of how it was meant to be for Salinger to write that novel that unwittingly summoned the world.” —Comics Grinder
Select Praise for Jerome Charyn
“Jerome Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer—so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.” —Tom Bissell
“Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature.” —Michael Chabon
“Charyn is a one off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination.” —William Giraldi
“[Charyn’s] sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.” —Jonathan Lethem
“One of our most rewarding novelists.” —Larry McMurtry
“Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy―a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain.” —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books
“Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New Yorker
“One of our most intriguing fiction writers.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Absolutely unique among American writers.” —Los Angeles Times
“A contemporary American Balzac.” —Newsday
“Charyn’s blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words.” —Washington Post
“[Charyn] writes with the sort of whirlwind energy that turns the seediest story into a breakneck adventure.” —Wall Street Journal
“Charyn has a gift for the unexpected, both linguistically and narratively. . . . The result is at once surprising and very entertaining.” —BookPage
“For half a century, [Charyn] has been an unpredictable, unclassifiable, and above all exactingly smart author.” —Open Letters Review
“Charyn makes artful use of historical fact and fiction’s panache.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Charyn, as he has proven time and time again, is a master of the written word.” —Jewish Journal
“Wherever he takes us, Charyn’s mind is always agile, and his prose is stunningly electric.” —Jewish Book Council
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-12-25
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.
