When news emerged three years ago that filmmaker Shane Salerno and writer David Shields were working on a lengthy oral biography (with accompanying documentary) about J.D. Salinger, I assumed it would be all smoke and no fire. Salinger, after all, had gone to ground after the publication of his novella “Hapworth 16, 1924” in the June 19, 1965, issue of the New Yorker; even in the wake of his death, in January 2010 at age 91, his estate had preserved the silence of his final 45 years. 
 
 What had he been doing for all that time at his hilltop retreat in Cornish, N.H.? Writing, certainly: Witnesses, including his former lover Joyce Maynard and his daughter, Margaret, who published back-to-back memoirs in 1998 and 2000, had already told us that. But what, exactly, had he written? And how had he persevered? 
 
 The latter question is perhaps more essential in regard to Salinger than any other 20th century American writer, for in his four slim books — “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Nine Stories,” “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction” — he sought to offer instructions for living, producing less stories per se than parables, or koans. 
 
 When Franny Glass, the youngest sibling in his fictional family of saints and martyrs, declares, “I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm,” she is speaking for Salinger, without question. But she is also sending a message he wants the rest of us to hear. 
 
 Salerno and Shields' book “Salinger,” it turns out, is an exploration of those messages, which Salinger seeded throughout his life and work. At nearly 700 pages, it's a bit of a shaggy monster, yet what may be most astonishing about it is its (largely) even tone. 
 
 The idea is to present a portrait of Salinger as both his own savior and something considerably darker; among its most troubling revelations is that Salinger pursued and even (in some cases) seduced teenage women; Maynard, who was 18 when he wooed her, was neither the first nor the last. 
 
 The book has already been in the news for uncovering, in the closing pages, plans to publish five new volumes of Salinger's writing, beginning in 2015. It's a mark of Salerno and Shields' achievement, however, that this seems in the end beside the point. Of course, if there were work, it would emerge eventually, although I fear that may be a mixed blessing at best. 
 
 Don't get me wrong: I'd read a laundry list if Salinger had a hand in it, but in the last years before his retreat, his writing began to grow increasingly insular, as if, the authors suggest here, he were writing for an audience of one. “Hapworth” is, to be frank, a disaster, a 20,000-plus-word letter narrated by Seymour Glass, then 7, who famously kills himself at the end of the 1948 story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Stilted, pedantic, it is, Shields observes, “dead on arrival — deliberately, angrily, fascinatingly so.” 
 
 The question is why — why Salinger deliberately set out to embrace anger and renunciation (or, perhaps, the Joycean trinity of “silence, exile and cunning”) and what this tells us about him not only as a writer but also as a human being. 
 
 “Salinger” argues that it begins and ends with World War II. 
 
 This is not a new theory; it was explored in Kenneth Slawenski's disappointing 2011 biography “J.D. Salinger: A Life,” which relies more on conjecture than reporting to make its case. But Salerno and Shields get the goods, digging up information on Salinger's war buddies, including Paul Fitzgerald, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence, and tracing the shattering sequence of his service on the battlefield, which began with D-Day and ended nine months later with the liberation of the concentration camp Kaufering IV. 
 
 “You can never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live,” Salinger once told his daughter Margaret. In Europe, in summer 1945, he had a breakdown, and returned home with what we now would identify as post-traumatic stress disorder. 
 
 “He put his arms on the table and rested his head upon them,” Salinger writes in “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor,” a rare fictional evocation of his war experience. “He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.” 
 
 Considered through such a filter, Salinger's life becomes a saga defined by its own trauma and the books a series of small miracles that, by all rights maybe, never should have existed at all. It's a point Salerno and Shields make explicit late in their own book, suggesting that “[t]he wounds made him; for nearly a decade, he transformed the wounds into agony-fueled art, and then — because he could not abide his own body, himself, his own war-ruined mind, the attention, the criticism, the love — he came to revile the world.” 
 
 At the same time, they argue, this was a double-edged process, in which he did an odd dance with his solitude, offering occasional interviews (most tellingly a 1974 conversation with the New York Times' Lacey Fosburgh) and even appearing in court in 1986 to give a deposition in his lawsuit against biographer Ian Hamilton. 
 
 “There's a part of him,” observes Salinger scholar John Wenke, “that enjoys the power game that went on when the Ian Hamilton biography was making its way through the courts. … An actual recluse or mystic wouldn't care.” 
 
 Wenke's right, which is why Salinger continues to fascinate us, half a century after his last published words. “Salinger” is at its best in tracing these contradictions — the litigious tender of his public image and the man whose last words were, reportedly, “I am in this world but not of it” — and in using them to humanize the author by revealing the depths of his flaws. 
 
 As for what's missing, I wish Salerno and Shields had given more information about who is speaking: Each chapter is a litany of names without attribution, leaving us unsure from whom we're hearing and why. There is also an unfortunate tendency to mix interview material with passages from published works, without distinguishing between them on the page. Interpretive chapters on “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Nine Stories,” as well as one on the role of “Catcher” in the crimes of Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr. and Robert Bardo, fall flat. ||||| J.D. Salinger at home in Cornish, N.H., with Emily Maxwell, the wife of William Maxwell, a close friend and Salinger's editor at The New Yorker. The photo, rarely seen until now, is part of a new documentary and book by filmmaker Shane Salerno. (AP/AP) 
 
 J.D. Salinger would hate this. 
 
 He would hate that there’s a soon-to-be-released book called “Salinger” that’s positively thick with previously unreleased photos, interviews and correspondence designed to fling open the windows on, arguably, the most famous American recluse in history. He would hate that the release on Tuesday of this more-than-600-page oral biography of the author of “The Catcher in the Rye” will come just three days before its companion documentary, also called “Salinger,” hits theaters. And, presumably, he really, really wouldn’t care for this article, which will unearth a few of the illuminating nuggets nestled within that forthcoming portrait of the scribe who died in 2010, leaving behind a legacy of celebrated prose and an enigmatic persona that is, apparently, immortal. 
 
 Among the Salinger-obsessed, this much-hyped book from David Shields and Shane Salerno, who also directed the documentary, is already being treated like the literary equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. It’s yielded the following major piece of news, first reported in the New York Times and since circulated pretty much everywhere: that five new books by Salinger — including fresh stories about the members of the Glass family, featured in “Franny and Zooey,” as well as the Caulfields of “Catcher” fame — apparently will be released beginning in 2015. The new additions to the Salinger library will also include what “Salinger” calls a “manual” of Vedanta, the Hindu philosophy Salinger followed during the second half of his life, as well as a novel and a novella inspired by his experiences as a member of the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps in World War II. This is certainly the biggest bombshell in “Salinger,” one that seems to confirm that the notoriously moody wordsmith continued to write steadily after the last published short story of his lifetime ran in a 1965 issue of the New Yorker. But that’s not the only revelation. 
 
 After a deep dive into the text of “Salinger,” which The Washington Post obtained prior to publication, the following facts also were gleaned, some of which will probably wind up as Gawker headlines or the lead item on a Buzzfeed listicle. (Jesus, Salinger would really hate that.) Note to those who don’t want to read any spoilers about what this tome or the Weinstein Co.-distributed documentary film discloses: There will be spoilers. 
 
 ●Salinger apparently had only one testicle. Two unidentified women and Werner Kleeman, who served in the Army alongside the author, confirm this information in the book. Shields and Salerno say that physical deficiency explains why Salinger was often drawn to much younger, sexually inexperienced women and may, in part, account for his reclusive behavior: “Surely one of the many reasons he stayed out of the media glare was to reduce the likelihood that this information about his anatomy would emerge.” Readers will have to decide whether they buy into the notion that Salinger sequestered himself for decades in Cornish, N.H., because he was afraid everyone would somehow find out he didn’t have a full pair. 
 
 ●Salinger allegedly annulled his marriage to his first wife, the half-German, half-French Sylvia Welter, because he learned that she was a Gestapo informant. The evidence the book provides in this regard is speculative, noting that the annulment decree accuses Welter of “false representation.” It also quotes Leila Hadley Luce, a journalist and former girlfriend of Salinger’s, who says: “He said he found out some disturbing things about what she did in the war, specifically with the Gestapo. . . . Jerry said she had lied to him and that when he learned what she had really done in the war he could not possibly remain with her.” 
 
 ●Salinger had a lengthy relationship with Jean Miller, who first captured his attention when she was 14 and he was 30. Miller — the inspiration for his short story “For Esmé — With Love & Squalor,” speaks about the five-year relationship in great detail for the first time in “Salinger,” including how it abruptly ended the morning after she lost her virginity to the writer. “I think he all of a sudden realized I was a phony, and that’s his word, ‘phony,’ ” Miller remembers, invoking that oft-used Holden Caulfield slur. It’s one of several tales of young women — including, most famously, Joyce Maynard — whose hearts were broken by a man praised for his understanding of the teenage psyche. 
 
 There are more details embedded in this Salinger material, of course, some of which reaffirm what was long rumored about Salinger or just add new shades of detail to a picture that can’t really be complete without Salinger’s input. 
 
 “Certain things, they should stay the way they are,” Holden Caulfield says at one point in “The Catcher in the Rye.” “You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.” 
 
 Evidently, with J.D. Salinger, that won’t ever happen. And boy, would he hate that. 
 
 Chaney is a freelance writer.
– If you thought the recent revelation that five new JD Salinger books are due out was juicy, well, you haven't seen anything yet. That tidbit came compliments of Salinger the book and Salinger the documentary, which were written/directed by David Shields and Shane Salerno and are both due out next week. While Jen Chaney calls that news "certainly the biggest bombshell," she drops a few of her own in the Washington Post, which got a copy of the book. Chief among them: He became a recluse in part because he only had one testicle. Shields and Salerno sourced this detail from two unnamed women and an Army pal of Salinger's; they claim it's why he tended to be with younger women (the book recounts his relationship with Jean Miller, who caught the then-30-year-old's eye when she was 14), and write that "surely one of the many reasons he stayed out of the media glare was to reduce the likelihood that this information about his anatomy would emerge." Another claim that Chaney notes is based on "speculative" evidence: That Salinger annulled his first marriage after finding out Sylvia Welter informed for the Gestapo. (Click for more tidbits.) Meanwhile, in a review for the LA Times, David Ulin gives credit to Salerno and Shields for getting "the goods, digging up information on Salinger's war buddies," but faults them for packing chapters with "a litany of names without attribution, leaving us unsure from whom we're hearing and why."