Books: 1948: THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer

War & No Peace

THE NAKED AND THE DEAD (721 pp.)—Norman Mailer—Rinehart ($4).

A 25-year-old Harvard graduate who fought at Leyte has written perhaps the best novel yet about World War II.

It is distinguished primarily for simple realism, a forthright, almost childlike honesty, a command of ordinary speech, a cool and effortless narrative style. The battle scenes are so vivid as to suggest War and Peace, the common soldiers as clearly visualized as Tolstoy's peasants. Unlike Tolstoy's masterpiece, it is all war, not only in the sense that there are no scenes of peaceful life poised against the scenes of war, but in the sense that a knowledge of the meaning of peace is absent from the characters. They seem never to have known anything else.