“Probably I was in the war. There is the mark of a wound behind my ear, an oblong of unfertile flesh where no hair grows. It is covered over now, and may be disguised by even the clumsiest barber, but no barber can hide the scar on my back. For that a tailor is more in order.
When I stare into the mirror I am returned a face doubtless more handsome than the original, but the straight nose, the modelled chin, and the smooth cheeks are only evidence of a stranger’s art. It does not matter how often I decide the brown hair and the gray eyes must have always been my own; there is nothing I can recognize, not even my age. I am certain I cannot be less than twenty-five and it is possible I am older, but thanks to whoever tended me, a young man without a wrinkle in his skin stands for a portrait in the mirror.”
Whenever I am reading an author who has been around for a long time, I tend to think about the scope of their career before too long. A lot of careers (for novelists who stick around) go one of a couple of ways. A modest debut will sometimes give way to a very ambitious second or third novel, and sometimes a very ambitious first novel eventually gives way to a very modest second or third novel. Norman Mailer began his career with The Naked and the Dead, one of the first of the big WWII novels, and a book that is ambitious in both scope and form, coming in at around 800 pages and involving a lot of the interiority of the various characters.
This book involves a single, first person narrator, and takes place exclusively in a Brooklyn walk up. Mailer was just shy of 30 when he published it, and it’s a very mid-20s novel. The narrator is Mike Lovett, a character who in the opening lines, suggests he’s experiencing a kind of personal (presumably metaphorical) amnesia about his early life as he finds himself now in his mid-20s trying to learn about to be a writer. This amnesia is both real for a lot of people — think about how different you felt at 18, 22, 25, 30 and wonder if you always connected those independent experiences and consciences to the same being. Sometimes I do, and other times very much not. He gets involved with a woman on the first floor who seems to own the place, has a three year old daughter, and talks about a husband who’s not around. There’s also an ambiguous character who lives on a different floor, whom Mike talks to from time to time about the world, and then a new figure, a young man from somewhere in the “heart of the heart of the country” (as they say), who seems comically naïve.
The seems initially to be about sex, writing, and discovery of one’s self, but what emerges is a meditation on the post WWII early days of the Cold War and the paranoia that describes it. What fails about this novel is that the tone and tension never quite reaches the fever pitch you want for it. There’s also some very uncomfortable sexualization that happens here, though it’s not immediately clear if it’s being observed or projected, and then how it’s being thought of.