Mailer has already found out about the psychology of the men who want power.

Most people who reach three times 26 never tumble to a fraction of what Mr. His assessment of something nearly as universal as fear inspired by danger comes out in the superb dialogues between the General and his aide. Mailer is still only 26 years old, the range and the grasp he shows seems extraordinary. (Some of them are perfectly respect-able, kindly, and restrained.) From time to time there is a flashback to the private home life of one or another of our heroes, and these passages, though brilliant in their analysis, are in some cases the weakest links in the sequence: in their compression they are a little too magazine-slick. We are made intimate with individuals of all ranks from the G.I.s to the General. It is a powerful, well-planned and excitingly intelligent book: a far more remarkable achievement than there is space to describe here.Īn American brigade is fighting the Japanese on a Pacific island. But in fact 'The Naked and the Dead' will only be scavenged for obscene passages by those whose taste or fancy is already for such nourishment. As for the Young Persons, those belonging to what used to be known as the working classes are commonly enlightened very early about elemental things, and the other boys and girls are not nowadays brought up prudish. There has been some conjuring up of the ghost of what Henry James called 'that Rhadamanthus of English literature - the Young Person.' Presumably British grown-ups have enough moral fibre to read without becoming demoralised, a book about soldiers fighting, frightened, swearing (which everybody knows most soldiers do all the time - and in any case almost everybody has been a soldier even the women have been in uniform by the hundred thousand), and about soldiers and their women and soldiers getting wounded and killed. His book is tremendously good, and perhaps better than that. If it comes to a showdown we stand by Norman Mailer. In the matter of The Naked and the Dead our duty as liberal and educated people is clear.

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer