I had great hope that I would love to read The Naked and the Dead. Although Norman Mailer is quite a few years older than I, he's a Brooklyn boy who became a somebody. Mailer went to neighborhood schools, then on to Harvard and the Army, and made a quite a splash. (As a matter of fact, he attended P. S. 161 in Crown Heights, a school that we at P. S. 217 regularly trounced in the summer softball league.) But The Naked and the Dead was less fun than I had hoped. It is 721 exhausting pages long. It has too many words, too many characters, too much flashback, too much repetitive talk. It's not epic; it's just long.
The profusion of detail swallows an exemplary story: on a south Pacific island, a platoon of soldiers is assigned to perform an impossible task. The platoon suffers deaths, injuries, wounds, tensions, and a variety of psychic traumas, even though, unknown to any of its members, by dumb luck and superior numbers, the American forces have long since broken through the Japanese lines and the battle for the island has been won.
The novel had a huge impact in 1948 and throughout the fifties and it started Norman Mailer on his astonishing and perplexing career. It was much discussed in the P. S. 217 schoolyard not only as a hot book (lots of talk about sex and a superabundance of "fugs") but also as a scary account of life in the United States military. It certainly frightened me.
It's hard to believe that fifty years have gone by I last read The Naked and the Dead. I still admire its ambition and I'm impressed that Mailer was just twenty-five years old when it was published, but I'm deeply offended by the want of economy, the lack of discipline, the narrow perspective, the philosophical incoherence, the plot lapses, and especially by the reliance on shallow ethnic stereotypes. I can't help thinking that, if Mailer had had patience and wisdom and, most of all, restraint, The Naked and the Dead might have been not a seven-hundred page monster but a two-hundred page masterpiece.
But I doubt that P. S. 161 put much emphasis on the virtue of restraint. In storytelling, Brooklyn guys choose hyperbole over litotes.
Comments