Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Sergeant Salinger by Jerome Charyn. My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the tour and to No Exit Press for my digital review copy.
About the Book
J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British.
A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war – from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood.
After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed.
Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a ‘spook,’ with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.
Format: Paperback (352 pages) Publisher: No Exit Press
Publication date: 21st October 2021 Genre: Historical Fiction
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My Review
I have never read The Catcher in the Rye and knew little about the life of its author J.D. Salinger before reading this book. However, I’m always fascinated by finding out more about the lives of writers and how their life experiences might have influenced their writing. I certainly did not know about J.D. Salinger’s wartime experiences but in Sergeant Salinger, Jerome Charyn brings these vividly to life showing not only their effect on Salinger but the brutality of war.
We follow Salinger through the preparations for the D-Day landings, the landing themselves and the Allied advance through Normandy and eventually to Paris. Along the way, Salinger experiences firsthand the reality of one-on-one combat with the enemy. ‘It was savagery in slow motion – men snarling, biting, shooting, and ripping at one another in a strange rhythmic dance.’ There are nightmare scenes as Salinger’s division fight their way through the Hürtgen Forest, a forest described as like something out of a fairy tale but one in which the ground is seeded with land mines, German snipers are hidden in pillboxes and mortar shells rain down. When Salinger and his comrades do reach villages that have been abandoned by the Germans they find booby traps waiting for them in the most unexpected places. Worse is to come when Salinger is one of the first to discover the horror of what is euphemistically called a Nazi a ‘labour’ camp but is in actuality a ‘charnel house’. Salinger also witnesses military incompetence and is forced at one point to become complicit in a cover-up on a chilling scale. Understandably it all takes its toll on his mental state.
It’s a far cry from the opening scenes of the book in which Salinger – in pursuit of the love of his life, Oona O’Neill – visits a New York night club frequented by Hollywood actors such as Peter Lorre and Merle Oberon, and rubs shoulders with his literary hero, Ernest Hemingway. (In one of the book’s more humourous moments, Salinger encounters Hemingway again but this time installed in the Ritz Hotel in a newly liberated Paris.)
At one point, Salinger expresses his desire ‘to write sentences that would scorch the reader’s soul like shards of burning ice’. Although there are occasional references to Salinger working on the novel that will eventually become The Catcher in the Rye, I would have liked to learn more about the development of his writing and the influence of his experiences on the book. Possibly this might have been more apparent to me had I read The Catcher in the Rye. Having said that, Sergeant Salinger is certainly a vivid evocation of the brutality and confusion of war, an experience no doubt shared by many other soldiers over the centuries.
In three words: Powerful, intense, dark
Try something similar: The Prince of the Skies by Antonio Iturbe
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About the Author
Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, he has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn lives in New York.
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