Perfect Strangers: Shields Takes on Salinger

Seattle’s David Shields just finished his secret project: the definitive seven-hundred-page bio of J. D. Salinger, cowritten with Shane Salerno, who directed the forthcoming documentary Salinger. It’s weird: America’s most celebrated celebrity-avoiding author is about to be exposed by one of America’s most imaginatively, relentlessly autobiographical authors. Shields is so wide open, his last book revealed even the length of his own phallus. Salinger was Mr. Private; Shields is Mr. Even-My-Privates-Are-Public.

Yet in a way, Shields is an apt Salinger biographer. Both have infinitely introspective minds preoccupied with the question of what’s phony and what’s real. “I’m hopelessly, futilely drawn toward representations of the real,” writes Shields in his recent book Reality Hunger. “I want to cut to the absolute bone. Everything else seems like so much gimmickry.”

Salinger loathed gimmickry. His Catcher in the Rye satirizes tourists from Seattle, who personify phonies wallowing in shallow celebrity culture. “If somebody, some girl in an awful-looking hat, for instance, comes all the way to New York – from Seattle Washington, for God’s sake – and ends up getting up early in the morning to see the goddamn first show at Radio City Music Hall, it makes me so depressed I can’t stand it.”

We can’t know what he’d think of his Seattle Boswell, a national expert on celebrity culture. “I’m excited about the Salinger project and very proud of the book,” says Shields, “but I’m not currently permitted to elaborate.” •