1....
IRVING HOWE
search for peril may end by paying heavily in strength and spirit.
But one thing is clear, that simply as a writer he is enormously,
even outrageously talented.
His early stories, written in college as imitations of proletarian
fiction and Dos Passos, already reveal his characteristic mixture of
professional skill and a refusal of the professional stance. Several
excerpts from
Barbary Shore,
which I remember as a very bad
novel, are included and they read astonishingly well, with a nervous
jabbing accuracy which lends some support to Mailer's claim that
the book has "the
air
of our time, authority and nihilism stalking
one another in the orgiastic hollow of this century." There follow
a few war stories which illustrate his large capacity for mimetic
vi–
vidness, for arranging sensory notation so that there will emerge a
shaped and tacit meaning. In these pieces, as in
The Naked and
the Dead,
one can also see the weaknesses which have marked
Mailer's fiction until very recently: first, that his prose, betraying
too strongly the influence of thirties' journalism, is often flat and
ungainly; second, that while superb at evoking an aura and spring–
ing a sequence of action, he has not yet looked into or cared about
a character deeply enough so that the character can burst out of
the fictional schema and into something like autonomous life.
The single best thing in the book
is
a long story, "The Man
Who Studied Yoga," which occupies a place in Mailer's writing
like that of "Seize the Day" in Saul Bellow's: the one work in
which the writer breaks past
his
self-image, to confront with
ab–
solute candor the ruins of experience. Just as "Seize the Day"
makes a good part of
Augie March
seem self-indulgent, so "The
Man Who Studied Yoga" makes a good part of
The Deer Park
seem willed and theoretic. Here, in simple transparent prose, Mailer
observes the burned-out rancor, the sourness of the generation that
came to maturity in the thirties. Tired, drained, weary of both
their comforts and complaints, a few Jewish ex-radicals--a dentist,
a lawyer, a comic-strip writer- spend a Sunday afternoon together
in New York. They exchange bits of gossip, suffer the noise of
their wives, throw off the gripes of middle age and-here Mailer
makes a bold, almost allegorical leap-watch together a porno–
graphic movie, the one stimulus that can now jerk them into a
