Books: The Weekend Revolution

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Mailer evokes some marvelously mordant closeups of his fellow "weekend revolutionaries" as they try to do their ritualistic protest thing quickly, so that they can get back to New York for a dinner party. "Lowell's shoulders had a slump," writes Mailer. "One did not achieve the languid grandeurs of that slouch in one generation—the grandsons of the first sons had best go through the best troughs in the best eating clubs at Harvard before anyone in the family could try for such elegant note." Ideologue Paul Goodman "looked like the sort of old con who had first gotten into trouble in the Y.M.C.A. and hadn't spoken to anyone since."

But Mailer always returns to himself. With an "egotism of curious disproportions," he catalogues his breakfast menus, his cures for the common cancers, even the virtues of each of his four wives. Sometimes he is the little boy full of comic-strip fantasies about riding around in a red helicopter, taking on the whole might of the U.S. Air Force and of "corporation-land" by shooting paint at the enemy choppers. At other times he fancies himself an exiled princeling (though from what country defies the imagination).

Often, he reveals himself as an archconservative who dislikes mass man and the whole modern era with its shoddy workmanship—one can almost see him in an English county seat decrying the servant problem and denouncing Labour amid outraged pipe smoke. He accurately describes himself as neo-Victorian in regard to sex; he speaks ill of homosexuality and masturbation, and proclaims that "without guilt, sex was meaningless." In fact, one sometimes wonders whether Mailer is not really an undercover agent of the old order, trying to undermine the Left from within.

Bellicose Charm. The Armies of the Night occasionally suffers from the languor that inevitably descends upon any one-character work. And it is not with out Mailer's usual excesses. He enjoys his own jokes too inordinately; he protests his right to protest too much, with some of the purplest prose apotheosizing America written since the rhetorical mauve of Thomas Wolfe ("Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . tender mysterious bitch"). For the most part, his genuine wit and bellicose charm, and his fervent and intense sense of legitimately caring, render The Armies of the Night an artful document, worthy to be judged as literature.