The Naked and the Dead

The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer
read: 2014
Modern Library #51, Guardian 1000 Novels

The Naked and the Dead has both a more limited and a more expansive scope than other war novels I've read. I say "limited" because it doesn't deal with the whole war, but rather one campaign for an island in the South Pacific. I say "expansive" because the story jumps between third-person perspectives, so we see how the war affects the whole platoon, plus General Cummings, Lieutenant Heard, and a other leadership figures in the unit. We see how the men in World War II fight, march, sleep, get letters, fire guns, eat, get medical attention, live, and die. We get glimpses of the decisions Cummings makes and the consequences to the Recon platoon.

There are a few action scenes where Mailer captures the danger and adrenaline of combat, but the bulk of the story is spent in day-to-day affairs. Danger is a fairly uncommon opponent - fatigue, the damp jungle, weakness, uncertainty, and loneliness beset the platoon much more frequently. Compared to what I'm used to from war stories, the novel spends a lot of time dwelling on day-to-day life. Consistent with this theme, the campaign is ultimately won not by some strategic master stroke or feat of individual heroism but because a shell hit a supply depot, resulting in the Japanese army's stores being depleted and their forces nearly starving.

I often think of World War II as a triumph of the Allied powers over the evil, anti-Semitic Nazis, but The Naked and the Dead reminds us that plenty of rank-and-file Americans harbored no love for the Jews. We see this in the blatant anti-Semitism of Gallagher and even Cummings, but also just in the subtler alienation that Goldstein and Roth feel throughout the story. It's an interesting angle.

The Gospel According to the Son

The Gospel According to the Son
by Norman Mailer
read: circa 2008

This is a great idea (re-writing Jesus' story from his perspective) and an ambitious one, but I don't know that it totally came together as a novel.

An American Dream

An American Dream
by Norman Mailer
read: circa 2005

A co-worker lent me this novel after we had discussed the Time Top 100 list. This was a mean, arguably misogynistic novel, but it has some indelible images, such as the protagonist walking along the edge of a roof while having a conversation with his wife's father towards the end of the book.

The Executioner's Song

The Executioner's Song
by Norman Mailer
read: 2012
Pulitzer Prize

Just a few weeks after tackling David Foster Wallace's magnum opus Infinite Jest, I decided to have a go at Mailer's 1000-pager The Executioner's Song.  I had read an article over at N+1 about crime and decided reading The Executioner's Song would help me understand more about the criminal justice system.  I don't know if it did that, but it was a terrific, gripping read.

The element I appreciated most was the moral ambiguity.  Gary Gilmore (the central figure, who committed two murders and was sentenced to death in Utah in the late 1976) has qualities we can sympathize with: he's thoughtful, intelligent, spiritual, can be sweet, and ultimately just wants to be loved.  We don't fully know what happened to him in the 14 years he spent mostly in prison early in his adult life, and we don't fully understand how his early childhood or stay in reform school shaped his later behavior, but there's a sense that things might have been different.  At the same time, Mailer in no way absolves Gilmore for his crimes, nor does he excuse them as a one-time lapse.  Gilmore is a disturbed, violent person with definite sociopathic tendencies.  He has a real and terrible impact on everyone whose life he touches.  But no human is one thing, even a man who murders two innocent people in cold blood, and we are left to confront the idea that there is something of Gary Gilmore in all of us.

The book is presented as non-fiction, though it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980.  It is written as a novel, including with specific scenes of dialogue.  It is impossible to tell what Mailer knows for sure, where he is repeating verbatim from interviews, where he is assembling scenes from various, possibly conflicting accounts, and where he is filling in gaps with fiction.  Certain scenes stand out in my mind - like what Gilmore said before killing his first victim - as fabrications where Mailer couldn't possibly know the truth.  It's not unethical, but it's not entirely journalistic at the same time.  Looking past that, I thought The Executioner's Song was excellent and thought-provoking.