War & No Peace

(2 of 2)

Nightmare in a Wonderland. In an atmosphere of uncomprehending misery, the platoon is ordered on a reconnaissance patrol on the far side of the island, over the vast peaks of the Watamai Mountains. It is in itself an incident in the war superior to most war fiction, the patrol through a wonderland of grass growing higher than the heads of the men, spiders, and endless spider webs, gnats, buzzing silence, rain and sunlight, golden sand and indigo trees—a nightmare in which one after another is killed. What deepens the irony is that the campaign is successful without the benefit of either General Cummings' strategy or the heroism of the platoon.

Author Mailer has borrowed his method from Dos Passes, modifying and adapting it, alternating his narrative with flashbacks which he calls The Time Machine, and with choruses of the men's tediously cloacal comments. By some alchemy, his book moves and lives despite the similarity of the biographies (quarreling parents, first sexual experience, unhappy marriage, pretty good job, the draft), its too great length, and the narrow political bias of the views set forth in it.

The Author. Norman Mailer attended public schools in Brooklyn, at Harvard studied engineering, shortly after graduation married Beatrice Silverman (later a lieutenant in the WAVES). During the war he served in Leyte, Luzon and Japan, as a clerk, an aerial photograph expert, a rifleman in a reconnaissance platoon, a cook, a baker. Discharged in 1946, he wrote The Naked and the Dead in a year and a half.