Word: mailer
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...ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, by Norman Mailer. The author's "egoism of curious disproportions" casts him as the logorrheic mock hero of last fall's peace march on the Pentagon, resulting in a literary tour de force that owes less to journalism than it does to the novelist's gift for relevant distortion...
...envy those lucky U.S. student activists! While they were meditating on Mailer and Goodman. I was wading through Macaulay's History of England and the Weber thesis. While they were getting the vote out in New Hampshire and Wisconsin, I was dragging 75% of a frequently apathetic student body to the polls in Choice '68. While they were having their theses postponed, I was up all night typing an overdue anthropology paper. While they were getting money from Daddy, I was hurrying to my Saturday job. While they were uncommitted to a future career, I was unsuccessfully seeking...
Bellicose Charm. The Armies of the Night occasionally suffers from the languor that inevitably descends upon any one-character work. And it is not with out Mailer's usual excesses. He enjoys his own jokes too inordinately; he protests his right to protest too much, with some of the purplest prose apotheosizing America written since the rhetorical mauve of Thomas Wolfe ("Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . tender mysterious bitch"). For the most part, his genuine wit and bellicose charm, and his fervent and intense sense of legitimately...
However, as journalism-which is history's fief in time-the book is another matter. Mailer is pretentious about Marxism. When he suggests that it would not really matter if all Asia went Communist, because expansion only creates problems for Communism, he is, at best, playful or naive. He brilliantly employs the suggestive, evocative devices of the new journalists-or old novelists. But he suggests too much, and evokes too wildly. He looks into the faces of the U.S. marshals and reads in them the notion that Viet Nam is where the "American small town" gets its "kicks...
...past dozen years, Mailer has developed cop-out infatuation with amateur journalism. During that time he wrote only two interesting but indifferent novels, An American Dream and Why Are We in Viet Nam? Ernest Hemingway, Mailer's onetime hero, also engaged in journalism but noted that "it blunts the instrument you write with." It may be time for Mailer to heed that warning...