Word: mailer
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...DEER PARK (375 pp.)-Norman Mailer-Putnam...
...Please do not understand me too quickly," warns Author Mailer by way of a tag (from André Gide). There is not much to understand in this narrative about the life of the West Coast's film fauna: the prose and the sex are as thick as ever. This seemed forgivable in The Naked and the Dead; the boys in a jungle combat platoon ("Kinsey's Army," as one British reviewer called it) were not supposed to talk like lady members of a book club. But in The Deer Park (the title is taken from a huge private...
...before a congressional committee. While skulking in Desert D'Or, Eitel dreams about the great film he hopes to make some day-a story about an M.C. of a This-Is-Your-Life-like TV program who decides to become a saint. That idea is a vulgarized Mailer version of a book called Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West-who also wrote a little satirical tale of Hollywood (The Day of the Locust), which in one page shows more style, wit and distinction than could be combed from all The Deer Park...
...piece of Hollywood argot not to be found in The Deer Park is "subpoena envy," which may be defined as the state of mind of the Hollywood liberal who never got called before a committee investigating anything. Author Mailer seems to have a bad case of it. His account of the interrogation by a pair of foul-mouthed goons in the hire of the "Subversive Committee" is calculated to frighten little children. It is bad enough for Mailer to paw every bed on the coast without finding Senator McCarthy underneath...
From the contributors to the symposium, whether Reinhold Niebuhr or Norman Mailer, the reader receives an impression of profound dissatisfaction with the American cultural context. The impression is seldom one of complete disillusionment, though bitter essays by Mailer and Irving Howe come close, but in general a picture of hopes very far from fulfillment...