E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #92: Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead
by Ernie on 03/01/08 at 10:46 am
#92: Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer (1948). This is a powerful and surprising debut from the 26-year-old Mailer, and it shows how compelling he could be before he transformed into a gas giant orbiting the pop culture solar system. Naked and the Dead remains striking as a war novel, because it displays the unheroic internal conflicts on each side during a war as well as the careerist revision of events for the “official history.” Some might be tempted to forget that some of the most heated battles of the war took place among the commanders on each side. Mailer provides a panoramic view of these conflicts, from the personality clashes of the grunts up to the ego jockeying of the commanders behind the lines. Mailer became an increasingly gaseous public presence throughout his life, and it is far from clear that the quality (never mind the quantity) of his writing will live up to the oversize stature that his public image achieved. Nonetheless, Naked and the Dead remains a powerful and engaging novel of manhood, courage, and human conflict.
Ernie
Jan 3rd, 2008
Hi, Ernie,
If Mailer has to be on the list, I’m glad to see he is very near the bottom. There is a story my grandfather used to tell about his early years at Little Brown and Co. and The Naked and the Dead. According to him, Mailer took his manuscript to Little Brown first. My grandfather, radical luminary and forward thinking man that he was, thought it was the best thing since a two-martini lunch, but the rest of the editorial board wouldn’t bite because it was too obscene. Having never read it, I’m curious: are there (gasp) obscenities and lewd remarks?
My grandfather always loved to tell the “one-that-got-away” stories, so it’s possible it received some of his editorial attention over the years, but I like to believe it is one hundred percent true.
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Ernie
Jan 3rd, 2008
Actually, the word “fuck” was replaced throughout with some corny and utterly unconvincing substitute, the “fugh”. It is a detriment to the novel. I personally do not like Mailer, but I think that his first book was a good one, and something of a classic. – Ernie
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