What do You think about The Naked And The Dead (2000)?
This is one of the great war novels from World War II. Norman Mailer studied aeronautical engineering at Harvard, but he became interested in writing, having his first story published at age 18. He was drafted after he graduated from college in 1943. He served in the Pacific with the United States Army, where he obtained the knowledge and experience to write about soldiers in combat. The Naked and the Dead was published when Mailer was 25. It instantly became a huge success, spending 62 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List. Mailer's reputation as a novelist was established by this book, which would be the first of a long line of best-selling war novels from the likes of other war veterans, including James Jones, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk and others. Mailer would go on to become a hugely famous, if combative American author. He would have more than 30 books published before his death at age 84 in 2007, including the receipt of two Pulitzer Prizes. He would run for mayor of New York City on one occasion, with the campaign slogan "No More Bull Shit."The Naked and the Dead takes place amid the Army's invasion of a fictional Pacific Island. There is plenty of military terminology and methodology but the book is more focused on the psychological development of the main characters as they interact in the situation they are placed into. Mailer, considered to be an early proponent of narrative fiction, presents a fascinating mix of individuals who all seem to be suffering from some kind of character flaw or other. Mailer throws flashback-style personal histories of the main characters at intervals as the current story unfolds. The one common denominator of all characters is that no one comes out of this story any better than when it began. This is in support of probably the central thesis of Mailer, that war is not just hell; it is psychosis. Some of the guys in the recon platoon include: Minetta, the malingerer, who fakes battle fatigue, only to find out that being the only sane person in a psycho ward is worse than being in combat; Red, the pre-war drifter, who finds out on the island that his health is deteriorating at an alarming rate; Wilson, the philanderer who used to laugh at getting a mild case of venereal disease and finds out before going into action that he is seriously diseased; Roth, the Jew who is not accepted as an equal by anyone on his anti-Semitec crew, who might finally find respect by sharing the platoon's trials on an arduous march, only to be killed in a fall from a cliff. The enlisted men hate their officers and the officers hate each other. Major Dalleson, the unimaginative S-3 (Operations Officer) fumbles to find a way to deal with a situation in place of the general, who is away for the day reporting to his superiors, and muddles through a solution that wins the battle against the Japanese, only to find that all recognition and credit for his actions is suppressed in the official battle history. Even the Division General, Cummings, is obsessed that enemies at Higher Headquarters will find cause to use any mistakes against him and stall his career.Lt. Hearn is probably to be considered to be the central character in the story. He starts by working as General Cummings' aide but gets removed from that position when he makes it clear that he can no longer tolerate hearing about the General's fascist world-view. He finds himself reassigned to the recon platoon just when it is assigned to perform a mission to travel behind Japanese lines and find a way for the Army to get its stalled invasion moving again. This patrol becomes the central element of the book, when these fourteen men go on this most physically grueling and dangerous march. Hearn, and the platoon, find that they must deal with rough terrain, jungle heat, the enemy, and perhaps most fatefully, the nominal leader of the platoon, Sgt. Croft. Croft, to me, is indispensable to the meaning and the progress of the book. His character flaw is that he is a psychopath. He is a highly motivated leader of his men and is the bravest of the group; he is the glue that holds everyone to their tasks when the going gets tough. But he is deranged. He leads his men by fear, and he enjoys killing. He becomes a seething vessel of rage when the platoon he had been leading is placed under the command of an officer (Hearn) prior to going on their fugging (Mailer's euphemism) event -filled reconnaissance, and this will not end pleasantly for Hearn or for the rest of the men. The Picador 50th Anniversary Edition contains an Introduction from Norman Mailer. He describes the book in the second person, as a very good effort by an amateur, albeit a passionate, hard-working amateur who had written over a quarter of a million words in college. He admits to some sloppy writing style in parts, with, to use his description, words that came too easily and the habit of all of the nouns in every sentence holding hands with the nearest adjective. I think he was a little bit self-critical but he was looking at his first big success from the perspective of fifty years of continuing writing success. He certainly was true when he said the book had immediacy, coming out when everyone was hungry for a "big war novel", and that he delivered with a good, vigorous story that got only better as it unfolded. Bravo, Norman.
—Richard
This is the shittiest book I have ever read.H. P. Lovecraft, the horror writer from the earlier decades of the 20th century, wrote very little dialogue in his stories because he was aware that he wrote bad dialogue. Stilted, pedantic garbage. He knew that his forte was the description and action of his stories and so for the most part he stuck to that and wrote some very satisfying creepy stories.By contrast, Norman Mailer wrote a great deal of dialogue in the "Naked and the Dead". He didn't write it because it was his strong suit. He wrote it because apparently he had no one close to him who was kind enough to say, "Norm, this is garbage. You need to rewrite this." He really could have used a friend like this. He really could have used a friend who told him, "Really, man, this whole book is a steaming pile of poop. Burn it. When the stench is gone you'll feel much cleaner."I have read a lot in the course of my life. Admittedly, not all of it has been great (see: Stephen King's "Desperation"). And some of it has been amazing. Some of it brought tears to my eyes and other stuff made me so angry I wanted to run over a convent of nuns. And in all this reading, of so many different types of fiction, I have never, and I say this with no equivocation or uncertainty, read anything as shitty as "The Naked and the Dead". I gave it one star because I couldn't figure out a way to give it a negative number of stars.The characterization was...just bad. As I alluded, the dialogue was horrible. Yes, stilted. Yes, pedantic. But also incredibly condescending. Most characters in the book were written in overwrought colloquialism that made them all seem retarded. None of the characters in the story had a) any redeeming qualities, or, b) anything that made them interesting. Every emotion in the book was set in as clumsy a manner as I've ever read. I've seen better from high school sophomores. Everything the characters said, and every thought they had (Mailer made sure to share everything everybody thought for the duration of the book) was an incessant bitch-fest: how bad they had it, how much the army was "fugging" them, how they were certain their wives back home were nailing anything with the ability to maintain an erection. Combine all this with the fact that nobody, nobody at all, succeeded in doing a single thing they set out to do over the course of 721 pages. Whether it was leading a platoon on patrol, standing up to the crazy sergeant, or carrying a body back to camp, or any of the score of other things characters in the book "tried" to do, everybody failed and the entire point of everything they attemted was to give the reader the opportunity to listen to their fucking whining about it.Nothing happens in the first 400 (400!) pages of the novel. Well, okay, there was some bitching. And this perverse tension as the latently homosexual general plays dominance games with his lieutenant aid. And one character's clap won't go away. But aside from that, there is a 400 page lull at the beginning that brings into question my own sanity for finishing (commitment, baby, commitment). So after a "dry beginning" that is longer than most novels, the platoon goes on its big mission. But first: let's look at the pretty sunset. So they look at the sunset and they go on their mission and not a great deal happens there either and then the book is over.The San Francisco Chronicle calls "The Naked and the Dead" "...perhaps the best book to come out of any war." The San Francisco Chronicle is full of shit.I read this book because Norman Mailer is one of the most acclaimed authors in the American canon. I wanted to see what sort of achievement his breakthrough novel (at the tender age of 24) might be. I expected "Saving Private Ryan". What I got was an insufferably boring novel. I might burn it. I sure wish Norman Mailer had. Your time would be better spent reading Archie comic books.
—Josh Moyes
Less a war novel and more a rumination on class and military structure, Norman Mailer's World War II book is a hard-edged "Catch 22" that dispenses with satire and revels in cynicism. Unlike Joseph Heller's masterwork, perhaps the definitive WWII book in close contention with Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," The Naked and the Dead contains no character we may call completely sympathetic, and is perhaps the only war novel out there that lacks a strict protagonist. The main character in The Naked and the Dead is the Army, and what it does to the psyche of the Greatest Generation. Mailer invents the island of Anopopei to serve as a backdrop for his multi-character study. There's enough of a war plot here to keep the casual reader entertained; but it's clear from the outset this is not Mailer's purpose in writing. A sharp criticism of the military's structure, and what it does to the minds of men ensconced in mortal combat, becomes quickly apparent, and his characters are less fully realized individuals (though he'll give you a back story for each, conveniently around the time the reader begins to hate them or they are killed) than stand-ins for ideas. The hard-nosed, straight-laced General Cummings cares more for his personal standing than the men he must order into battle; his foil, Lieutenant Hearn, is a ne'er-do-well Ivy League boy whose idealism gets him thrown into danger. The men of the recon platoon harbor their own discriminations and a grating chauvinism that can make passages of the book difficult to read for modern audiences. Still, Mailer gets his hard-headed point across in gripping fashion, making you care just enough about the cannon fodder who are just as capable of pathos as they are of committing unspeakably violent and terrible acts. Mailer also writes with the breathless, straightforward prose you would expect from a journalist yet paints a convincing picture of his characters and their surroundings. Casual readers will balk at the attention to military detail, a convention neither Heller nor Vonnegut thought necessary to make their points and one that can bloat Mailer's tale at times. Still, this work deserves to be read in that same post-military-industrial-complex vein, and is a worthwhile read for the sociologists and anthropologists out there as well.
—Kip
