New Orleans Review, June 2014
what I expected to be some invasive act of voyeurism turned out instead to be a work of scholarship, introspection, honesty and sincerity. Beller acknowledges that what he is doing is against the will of his subject. The finest moments in The Escape Artist often arrive when Beller turns his critical eye away from Salinger and onto himself. The reader sees the biographer, scurrying back and forth between two tables in the Salinger archive, one where the source letters and documents lay, where pencils and paper are forbidden, and the other where his laptop sits open and alone, and Beller describes his research as carrying handfuls of water between the two tables. In another instance Beller is trying to pull information from the daughter of Salinger’s New Yorker editor, Gustave Lobrano. Through their conversations, Beller conveys how carefully he must word his requests, and how he must distinguish himself from the hordes who have hounded these sources for information over the years.