Word: mailers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This book qualifies as the German Naked and the Dead on the literary principle of silt by association. Author Böll, 37, known to U.S. readers for Acquainted with the Night (TIME, Oct. 4, 1954), lacks the power Norman Mailer showed in his first novel, but he wallows in the same mud-and-tears and reaches the same inevitable conclusion, i.e., war is a dirty, futile business. Adam has no heroes, only victims. The time is 1944; the place, principally occupied Hungary, as the mighty Wehrmacht comes apart at the tank sprockets. A panoramic miniaturist, Author...
...DEER PARK (375 pp.)-Norman Mailer-Putnam...
...Please do not understand me too quickly," warns Author Mailer by way of a tag (from André Gide). There is not much to understand in this narrative about the life of the West Coast's film fauna: the prose and the sex are as thick as ever. This seemed forgivable in The Naked and the Dead; the boys in a jungle combat platoon ("Kinsey's Army," as one British reviewer called it) were not supposed to talk like lady members of a book club. But in The Deer Park (the title is taken from a huge private...
...before a congressional committee. While skulking in Desert D'Or, Eitel dreams about the great film he hopes to make some day-a story about an M.C. of a This-Is-Your-Life-like TV program who decides to become a saint. That idea is a vulgarized Mailer version of a book called Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West-who also wrote a little satirical tale of Hollywood (The Day of the Locust), which in one page shows more style, wit and distinction than could be combed from all The Deer Park...
...piece of Hollywood argot not to be found in The Deer Park is "subpoena envy," which may be defined as the state of mind of the Hollywood liberal who never got called before a committee investigating anything. Author Mailer seems to have a bad case of it. His account of the interrogation by a pair of foul-mouthed goons in the hire of the "Subversive Committee" is calculated to frighten little children. It is bad enough for Mailer to paw every bed on the coast without finding Senator McCarthy underneath...