Books: The Weekend Revolution

(3 of 3)

However, as journalism—which is history's fief in time—the book is another matter. Mailer is pretentious about Marxism. When he suggests that it would not really matter if all Asia went Communist, because expansion only creates problems for Communism, he is, at best, playful or naive. He brilliantly employs the suggestive, evocative devices of the new journalists—or old novelists. But he suggests too much, and evokes too wildly. He looks into the faces of the U.S. marshals and reads in them the notion that Viet Nam is where the "American small town" gets its "kicks." And he fails to note as a sound journalist would, that there were U.S. marshals just like these who escorted James Meredith through crowds of rednecks at the University of Mississippi. He also has visions of future concentration camps in America (with Muzak)—a fantasy worthy of a propagandist or novelist, but hardly a reporter.

In the past dozen years, Mailer has developed cop-out infatuation with amateur journalism. During that time he wrote only two interesting but indifferent novels, An American Dream and Why Are We in Viet Nam? Ernest Hemingway, Mailer's onetime hero, also engaged in journalism but noted that "it blunts the instrument you write with." It may be time for Mailer to heed that warning.