An odd first experience with Norman Mailer: very engaging, well-written book (The Naked and the Dead) that took me just about three months to read (why.) and seemed more like it was from 1970's Vietnam than 1948 WWII. Also odd in that I didn't have any marginalia commentary.
Back in 1948, The Naked and the Dead was considered a "powerful cultural attack on the sentimentality and heroic quality of wartime culture" (Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory, Bodnar), something that would only increase and magnify with Vietnam in 20 years. The majority of the book takes place in the tropical jungle and I really kept forgetting this was WWII. There's the "pointless mission" trope, comedic bureaucracy, the enemy as the victim and the non-heroic qualities of the main male characters. And just for good measure let's throw in religious and sexual subtexts (don't ask, don't tell circa 1940's). Bodnar writes that the characters are "consumed by personal quests of power and destructiveness" -- the same in war as in socioeconomic America. You could probably write an entire thesis on the trifecta of Cummings, Hearn and Croft, all of whom have since become stereotypical characters with bits and pieces in other war fiction (and probably non-fiction).
Bottom line(s): As I was nearing the end of the book I was reading with a sense of dread and cliche: man, I KNOW what's going to happen next, but I need to read it anyway and it's not going to end well. In fact, it ended better than expected and not as expected. Some surprise twists and turns. The book definitely checks all the boxes for 'postwar critical fiction' but the writing was excellent and I look forward to reading something different by Mailer. Or, since this book was so prescient, what he has to say about Vietnam.
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