Norman Podhoretz
NORMAN MAILER:
THE EMBATTLED VISION
Norman Mailer is one of the few postwar American writers
in whom it is possible to detect the presence of qualities that power–
fully suggest a major novelist in the making. Anyone trying to de–
scribe these qualities would be likely to dwell on Mailer's extra–
ordinary technical skill, or on the boldness and energy of his mind,
or on his readiness to try something new whenever he puts pen to
paper. What seems even more remarkable, however, is that his
work has responded to the largest problems of this period with a
directness and an assurance that we rarely find in the novels of his
contemporaries. Mailer is very much an American, but he appears
to be endowed with the capacity for seeing himself as a battleground
of history-a capacity that is usually associated with the French and
that American writers are thought never to have. He is a man given
to ideologies, a holder of extreme positions, and in this too he differs
from the general run of his literary contemporaries, so many of whom
have fled ideology to pursue an ideal of sensible moderation both in
style and philosophy. To follow Mailer's career, therefore, is to wit–
ness a special drama of development, a drama in which the deepest
consciousness of the postwar period has struggled to define itself
in relation to the past, and to know itself in terms of the inescapable,
ineluctable present.
Now for many people the only Mailer worth considering is
Mailer the realist, and for these
The Naked and the Dead
is the only
one of his three novels that matters at all.
It
is true, I think, that
Mailer's phenomenal talent for recording the precise look and feel
of things is his most impressive single gift, and there is some ground
for arguing that in deserting realism he has made insufficient use of
this power. But it was not by arbitrary choice that Mailer abandoned
