March 29, 2015
Prior to reading this book, the only thing I knew about Mailer was that he had a cameo on Gilmore Girls not long before his death. He and his biographer were regulars in an episode at the Dragonfly Inn during the slow lunch hour, ordering only a pitcher of iced tea. Chef Sookie (Melissa McCarthy) blamed Mailer for the failing lunch menu, and even goes off on him. About two seconds after her tantrum, she realizes she is pregnant, and announces this to him (hence the title of the episode, "Norman Mailer, I'm Pregnant"). A very confused Mailer kindly congratulates her.
I find this cameo to be random as shit. He apparently only did it because they didn't make him memorize any lines, and because he thought the show was less crappy than most crap on TV or something. Just from the little I looked up on him, it seems that Mailer lived a very interesting life. Perhaps I should read a biography sometime.
Anyway, I "assigned" myself this book, to be completed over Spring Break. I'm back to work tomorrow, so I've barely made my self-imposed deadline. That's not from any lack of appreciation for this novel, Mailer's first. It's just that it's quite long, 721 in the paperback 50th anniversary edition. It was slow going at times, but overall I felt like this book could have been longer and I would not have minded.
This book does not try to glorify the Army or World War II. It was gritty and realistic, and the characters, who represented to some extent the diversity of life in America, seemed quite real. There were no wholly "good" guys or "bad" guys here. The soldiers and the officers were depicted "naked," flaws and all, in this stressful, oppressive environment.
The book tells the story of the campaign on (fictional) Anopopei, a Pacific island. The story is mainly from the perspective of the men in a specific platoon, who are recon (okay, I'm still not 100% sure what that means). But the general in charge of the American troops on this island, Cummings, and Lieutenant Hearn (who is eventually reassigned to recon) are main characters, too. The reader is intimate with the past lives of many of these men, and their current hopes and fears.
Because of this, I kind of feel the same way about the structure of armies during wartime as I do about slavery: it is fucking scary to put the lives of people in the hands of other people, because human beings are flawed creatures. Cummings is considered a good strategist, but he has a petty and vindictive side, and he's prideful and personally ambitious. The sexual tension between he and Hearn is fascinating. It's pretty obvious that they both have repressed homosexual tendencies; shit, Hearn explicitly says in his "time machine" segment that he's bicurious! I wonder, though, why Mailer only made characters who were officers this way. I also wonder how many privates in the war were "Brokebacking it" in their pup tents, if they were able to get away with that. Anyway, Cummings is not the cool and objective officer that you'd want making decisions about other people's lives; he kinda admits to himself that he sent Hearn on the mission with recon in hopes that he'd be killed, as "punishment" for disappointing him, for not sharing his views on being in charge of soldiers.
Croft, the sergeant who has been in charge of the recon platoon for some time, is very flawed himself. His actions result in the deaths of Hearn and Roth, and for what? His own pride? He's depicted as being heartless, ever since he was a child, but it was his wife's cheating that really drove him over the edge. And he is not without fear; fear of failure, fear of losing control, is the driving force behind many of his actions.
Sexism, racism, and prejudice abound amongst the men in recon. They're pretty hypocritical towards women...you know, the old double-standard. I didn't think there was evidence that Brown's wife was cheating on him, but since his beloved older sister cheated on her husband and got a bad reputation, he's now convinced that his wife and all women are whores. And yet it's acceptable, and funny, for Wilson to be super horny and promiscuous. Of course, poor Wilson does have an STD, which might have killed him if a bullet in the gut hadn't gotten him first.
The men in this platoon exemplify the fact that anti-Semitism was definitely not limited to Nazi Germany at this time. Goldstein and Roth are both ridiculed for being Jewish. Goldstein bitterly internalizes this, while Roth is flabbergasted. He has personally denounced the Jewish faith, and doesn't like that he can't shake that label. There's no common understanding by the end of the book. Roth is dead, and while Goldstein and Ridges (my favorite character, I think) are cool with each other, Goldstein will probably still be called a "Jewish bastard" or similar when anybody in the platoon is miffed with him.
In spite of these views (which were, unfortunately, not uncommon for the time), I sympathized with these men. Some of them had it really rough before the war, like Red. Gallagher's wife died in childbirth while he's on Anopopei, and he's afraid that he won't live to see his child. Ridges can't even read and write, and hates the manual farm labor and hopelessness waiting for him at home. Financially, Cummings and Hearn had it easier, but not emotionally, especially Cummings. Everyone suffers. But in these harsh conditions, the men are quick to turn on one another, rather than show a little understanding and lend a helping hand. That's human nature, I suppose.
And that's what makes this book so powerful. It's about human nature more than anything else, what people do when they're stripped of their pride, of their worldly comforts (modest though they might have been). The fact that Cummings' troops win the campaign isn't even the point of the book. I don't know if this book is anti-war, but it is showing what war does to the individual. That's important, because fundamentally, the armed forces are concerned with the whole, not the individual. But human lives and personal narratives do matter.
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