![]() It is a curious sociological fact that, until Mailer wrote his book, the conduct of the recent war as described by the run of war novels seemed no more productive of unpleasantness than the outings of a normally ill-behaved boys’ club. ![]() ![]() And what a record! Mailer is hardly the great war novelist, indeed in the final accounting his limitations bulk larger than his accomplishments, yet his detonating outburst, huge, acrid, and raspingly uncouth, comes as a relief-a whiff of the actual-after the pussyfooting of his contemporaries. For the first time we have a record of the dirty, hard business that the Second World War was for the combat soldier. Norman Mailer’s novel about the war in the South Pacific can be regarded as the inevitable reaction to the pallid, neatly trimmed literary commodities turned out by the graduates of Yank, Stars and Stripes, and the OWL It is the explosion of the army’s underside, the sewer of hostility and fear and petty annoyance and boredom that until now has been either covered up by banalities or avoided altogether. ![]()
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