Word: mailers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Naked and The Dead-Norman Mailer...
...Glue of Lust. This time Mailer's jungle is asphalt instead of tropical. Penned in the stuffy cubicles of a Brooklyn rooming house are some of the wrecks and the wreckers of contemporary society. Mock hero of the piece is Michael Lovett, an ex-G.I. with a remade plastic face and a blacked-out memory, the author's symbol for the crippled common man. A writer, "Mikey" Lovett tries to grasp the haunted, hunted relationships around him. Soon he finds that he and the other occupants are stuck together with the glue of lust and politics...
...Stilts of Fallacy. Halfway through the book it becomes clear that Lannie and Hollingsworth are working together to force McLeod to surrender a precious "little object" stolen from the U.S. Government. From then on, in a nonstop talkalogue, Author Mailer shunts his narrative cargo off the fictional track and into an editorial tract. Using the stereotypes of the tortured confessional, the state spy, the bureaucratic machine, universal fear and insecurity, he achieves at best a small-beer Nineteen Eighty-Four. At worst, he talks like a highbrow caught with his I.Q. down...
Riffling the dead leaves of a bankrupt dream, neo-Marxist Mailer sees one faint hope, "socialist culture." This idea, which ex-Stalinist McLeod passes on to Lovett as a heritage-just before Government Agent Hollingsworth does him in-seems to be the precious "little object" the poor fellow has been nursing all along...
...Mailer nails his flag to the mast as a sort of last-of-the-intellectual-leftists. But his novel, paceless, tasteless and graceless, is beached on a point of no fictional, or intellectual, return...