Scott Bowles in
USA Today gave
Salinger 3 ½ out of 4 stars: "Eloquently written and exhaustively reported...
Salinger is an unmitigated success... There's no denying that Shields and Salerno have struck journalistic gold.
Salinger is a revelation, and offers the most complete picture of an American icon, a man deified by silence, haunted by war, frustrated in love—and more frail and human than he ever wanted the world to know."
Lev Grossman of
Time said
Salinger "presents a decade's worth of genuinely valuable research... there are riches here...
Salinger doesn't excuse its subject's personal failings, but it helps explain them: in his fiction, Salinger had a chance to be the good, untraumatized man he couldn't be in real life." John Walsh of
The Sunday Times (London) called the book "A stupendous work." David Ulin of
Los Angeles Times wrote, that "
Salinger gets the goods on an author's reclusive life... it strips away the sheen of his exceptionalism, trading in his genius for something much more real."
Associated Press said
Salinger was "thoroughly documented... Providing by far the most detailed report of previously unreleased material, the book... both fleshes out and challenges aspects of the author's legend." Tina Jordan of
Entertainment Weekly gave the book a grade of B−, saying that "the reminiscences are layered with a stunning array of primary material…taken as a whole—the memories, the documents, the pictures—the book feels as close as we'll ever get to being inside Salinger's head," while also writing that the book is "a bit of a shambling, unwieldy mess."
Kirkus Reviews called it a "thoroughly revealing biography," stating that "Shields and Salerno chase down the story in minute detail." Jeff Simon wrote in
Buffalo News that this is a "now-irreplaceable book about the greatest enigma of modern American literature...
Salinger can't tell 'all' about its subject but it tells more than we've ever known before... a complex but well-constructed narrative composed of fragments of history, anecdote and commentary." Tucker Shaw in
The Denver Post called the book "an exhaustively detailed portrait of the famously reclusive novelist J. D. Salinger." Carl Rollyson in
The Wall Street Journal wrote that while the book was "engrossing," it "is biography as scrapbook, chock-full of well-known figures and well-worn stories." Rollyson said that
Salinger "would be more fun if it had an index, so that the dopey parts could be skipped." He concluded, "
Salinger also never comes together as a story for readers" and suggested that "the raw material in
Salinger will need to be digested by yet another biographer... We have waited so long to understand J. D. Salinger. We must wait longer." In
The New York Times,
Michiko Kakutani thought that the authors had done "an energetic job of finding sources and persuading them to talk" but the books's "Internet-age narrative" and "sloppy scholarship," made it "a sprawling, cut-and-paste collage." Writing in
The Guardian (London), Sam Leith said that the volume contained "new and fascinating nuggets" and "isn't worthless." He summarized it as "vast, silly, boastful, prurient, intellectually incoherent and basically philistine" and "a frustrating hodgepodge." "[M]uch of what is in here has no real bearing on Salinger's works themselves," wrote Martin Rubin in
The Washington Times, "and is simply yet another contribution to what
Joyce Carol Oates pungently termed pathography." Rubin also wrote that the book was "well-presented and valuable…consistently interesting." Louis Bayard of
The Washington Post wrote that "the book offers the most complete rendering yet of Salinger's World War II service, the transformative trauma that began with the D-Day invasion and carried through the horrific Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the liberation of a Dachau subcamp." However, he criticized many other elements of the book, writing, "It contains no index. Its end notes are seriously incomplete. Its passing errors (names are misspelled more than once) suggest a book that has been rushed to market. The absence of connective prose tissue leaves the pages echoing with voices and countervoices and no clear way to distinguish between them." Pat Padua in
Seattle Post-Intelligencer described the book as "terrible," specifying it as "badly edited, poorly conceived, and at times embarrassingly written." In
Los Angeles Review of Books, Cornel Bonca found
Salinger to be "stuffed with lots of good raw information" and marked by a "clear, often compelling narrative." Overall, Bonca found that the "bloated" and "ham-fisted" book was "an elaborate cut-and-paste job" that constituted "a savage and somewhat revengeful disembowelment." Andrew Romano of
The Daily Beast wrote, "
Salinger is full of fascinating revelations" though after its "breathless attempts" to explain its subject, "I still didn't have a handle on what Salinger was like." The average review score for this book, on Amazon, as of August 2018, was 3.6 out of 5 stars. == Further reading ==