cover image Listen

Listen

Wendy Salinger, . . Bloomsbury, $22.95 (243pp) ISBN 978-1-59691-083-6

His epitaph reads "TEACHER, POET, TRANSLATOR." Salinger, in this memoir of her father (whom she refers to as Victor), leaves a full portrait of the man in the shadows from which she gleans a two-part personal and family history ("Life Before Death"; "Life After Death"). With creative control and telling imagery, poet Salinger (Folly River ) renders the everyday absorbing. Shifting voice, recreated internal and external dialogue, suggestion, nuance and detail draw readers voyeuristically into the marriages, births, school days, hospital stays, aging, ailments and deaths of Salinger's family headed by an abusive, self-centered, self-indulgent artist father. "All families," according to the voice Salinger gives her mother, "have their secrets." Although political items (civil rights sit-ins, fallout shelters) set the historical context, Salinger, particularly in the second section, veils the personal through stream-of-consciousness monologue and allusive private poems. Eulogy and indictment remain unresolved. Salinger has two burdens: to honor her father ("The hand that guided me. That put the pen in my hand") and to struggle through the recovered memory of his sexual abuse ("Way back. Way far away. A long, long time ago, he put his hand there"). In this tender and tough remembering, Victor's line "He who understands all forgives all" may enlighten but not assuage. (Apr.)