Norman Mailer

Swamped at work, and the Spanish class is starting to demand some real study time, so not much time to blog. I did finish Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead last weekend, however. I've been reading it since last August. If I had to give a one-sentence assessment, I would have to say that it's worth the considerable effort. It's definitely somewhat of a slog -- the plot unfolds extremely slowly, and Mailer gets into the tiniest particulars of every character's inner life, their rexternal circumstances, and their history, and there are a lot of characters. This is appropriate, however. One of Mailer's main goals with this novel, as far as I could tell, is to communicate, as vividly as possible, just how much of a slog and a grind the daily business of fighting a war is, how little of significance happens during the vast majority of time, and how small a portion of the total actual fighting is. In this, he succeeds spectacularly, in no small measure because the very experience of reading the book shares these characteristics with what the book describes. Don't get me wrong -- it's not all a slog. The engagement factor of the plot follows an almost hyperbolic curve -- the closer you are to the end, the more exciting it becomes. On the last 150 pages, I couldn't put it down.

Most of the characters are excellent. All struggle, both with the externals of the war-fighting experience, and with the internal stuff --their emotions, histories, events of their life before call-up. If I had to pick a favorite, I would have to say General Cummings, probably because most of his struggle is intellectual. Plus, the existential implications of the plot twist that has his subordinate officer essentially blunder into victory on the one day Cummings had to be away after Cummings spent months planning the minutiae of the campaign are priceless. All that said, one of the reasons The Naked... is my kind of book is because I didn't fully sympathise with any of the characters. None are truly likable, with a possible exception of Goldstein (is that Mailer's autobiographical character?), and for one reason or another, that sort of nihilistic tilt always appealed to me. Much more can be said about the book -- it's a product of its time (and reflects it very well), the machismo Mailer is supposedly known for is already in evidence (this was his first full-length novel), but it's more subtle and multidimensional than I expected, did Croft really shoot Hearn?, etc. etc., and no doubt all that has been written about to death already. I should ask N. if she ever had to do anything on Mailer in general, and on this book in particular, as part of her work for Gale. What I did wonder as I was reading was what today's soldiers would think of it. How similar is their experience to that of Mailer's characters. Has the experience of war fighting change fundamentally since WWII, physically, emotionally or both?

Suffice it to say that I recommend the book. It's a major commitment for sure, but one that will bear fruit if you're patient enough to stick with it.